Review: Fitbit Zip

When the original Fitbit came out a few years ago, there was very little else like it on the market. Wearable movement trackers were a novelty, and the Fitbit had no equal, thanks to its seamless data transfers and delightfully user-friendly software interface. But time moves on, and now there are plenty of excellent options – like the monitors from BodyMedia and Nike – to track your movements, sleep and calories burned. That's the market the Fitbit Zip, one of two new offerings from the company, waddles into.

Slip it in your pocket, on your collar, or pretty much anywhere, and it begins tracking your movements.The Zip is a key-fob-sized, er, fob with a clip on one side to hook to your clothes. On the other side is a wee (0.75 x 0.5-inch) monochrome LCD screen. You slip it in your pocket, on your collar, or pretty much anywhere, and it begins tracking your movements each day.

To see where you stand, just tap the monochrome screen – itself an improvement over the previous Fitbit. Keep tapping to scroll through calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, time, plus a little Tamagotchi-style emoticon who smiles, grins or sasses you depending on how much you've shaken your booty on any given day.

Even better, it's got built-in Bluetooth. By harnessing the ancient power of radio, the Zip will send updates to either an app on your phone (iOS only, with Android on the way. Sorry, all 12 of you Windows Phone users), or a web dashboard via a small app that runs in the background on your desktop. The Zip comes with a little USB key that plugs into your computer to receive data. It's a fantastic feature. You never have to sync anything, but your steps are just there.

There is some sort of promise of easy fitness with the Zip and products like it, a hint that by simply wearing it, you're going to shed pounds via ambient awareness of your movements and activity level. That's just not true. Having spent several years now with some sort of monitor hooked up to my body, tracking is only one small part of getting into shape. For example, there is a Nike+ GPS Sport Watch on my counter that asks me the same question every day via a message on its screen: "Time for a Run Today?" The answer is always no.

Having said that, there are some really great things about the Zip that will encourage you to exercise if you are open to it. It awards little badges – taking 10,000 steps in a day, logging your first 50 miles walked – and I found myself checking in to see if I'd earned more.

It counted my steps like a choreographer, right out of the box. Although you can set your stride length in the web dashboard, I never found reason to do so. Counting was consistently accurate enough: within three to seven steps for every 100 I took. The calories burned counter is useful as well, especially when you use it with the app's food-tracking feature (see below).

Other manual inputs in the smartphone app also help make Fitbit more of a total fitness-tracking utility. Ride your bike to work this morning? Great. Add that as an activity, and it will include the calories you burned on your ride to your day's total, even if you never took the Zip out of your bag. Suck down a couple of Big Macs at lunch? Just enter that into the app on your phone, fattie, and Fitbit will automatically add in the calories. Its database knows the caloric value of all the common foods, and you can manually add in the calorie counts from foods it doesn't know.

But that manual inputting is, well, a chore. The Fitbit's killer feature has always been its ability to provide a fully automated experience. Pulling your phone out and manually inputting meals and activities is a nice touch, but it's not why you'll buy this. Plenty of other apps already pull this off, while tracking other metrics like location to boot.

But if this product has a weak point, it's the clip. Not that it doesn't hold fast (it does!) but because you have to remember to clip it to your clothes each day. Twice, I left the house without it and missed full days of step-counting. I was also perpetually worried that I would forget to take it out of my pocket and have it end up in the wash. I really prefer devices that are body-wearable, like the Nike FuelBand.

And then there is the battery. It uses a 3V watch battery. This is great, in that just as you don't have to connect the Zip to anything to transfer data, you don't have to dock it to any sort of base station to charge it. And battery life is quite good – after more than two weeks, I'm still at a "high" battery level. But I'm guessing that when it comes time to swap the battery, a lot of these Zips will simply wink out in sock drawers of sadness like a cheap watch.

Still, overall, this is a great little pedometer and activity tracker. It's fun to use, easy to setup and understand, and just plain works.

WIRED Tap-to-view stats are wonderful and motivating. Goals and badges give you something to work towards. Syncs better than the kitchen section at Home Depot. Comes in multiple colors so you can express your individuality in one of five ways.

TIRED You snooze, you lose: This Fitbit doesn't do sleep tracking. You are so going to lose this sucker harder than a Pac 12 team playing in an SEC home game.

Update, Oct 4: The original review was changed to clarify the functionality offered on the previous Fitbit.