Disappointed in FitBit

I'm sorry for a very straightforward verdict rather than the usual pros and cons and letting you make up your mind. But that is how strongly I feel about it.
It was the first day of recording 'a week in my life' back in end of october when I snapped on fit-bit for the very first time and was very disappointed to find out that it is nothing but a pedometer on a wrist band which is connected to an app on my phone.

So, here's a short list of pros:

• Its a pedometer on your wrist so you don't have to carry your phone with you every where.
• It can motivate you to get to 10,000 daily steps.
• You can keep track of how much water you drank besides the food calorie intake.

And the cons:

• It's a band worn on the non dominant hand where the wrist watch is supposed to go but doesn't even tell you the time.
• It doesn't have a heart rate monitor to know when you are active and when you are still. If you don't move, it assumes you must be sleeping.
• You have to tap on the device when you are ready to fall asleep, that means no falling asleep while reading a book.
• You can enter your approximate sleep time the next morning but then it defeats the purpose, if its just gonna tell you how much you moved or not during your sleep.
• Its pedometer logic (mind you its the only feature) is faulty so if I go around the block with the puppy (about half a mile), it records 2000 steps, equivalent to 1 mile but if you spend an hour doing high intensity zumba (about a 5K calorie burn), it hardly records a couple thousand steps.
• Its App doesn't have the feature to add any work out except for walk, run and hike. So Zumba doesn't get registered and you can't add it later either; not very motivating.
• The calorie counter in the app doesn't have a bar code scanner.

All in all, to spend $100.00 for a device that does half the tasks that my smart phone and a couple of free Apps can do,  seems like a bad bargain. 

I use the App, 'Lose it' to track my fitness goals and caloric intake and even the free version of this app allows me to scan the bar code and track the food I ate. I can enter my exercise and even create personalized ones that are not in the database or just enter the numbers from my treadmill. That's not all it even counts my steps using my phone as a pedometer, so as long as I carry my phone with me, my activity is getting tracked.

Another one of my favorite activity App is 'Runtastic Pro', it keeps track of everything from fast pace walking to biking to hiking. The App is tied to the maps on the phone so instead of the steps you can actually see the miles you covered.

The other issue with fit bit band (at least for me) is that it goes where my wrist watch is supposed to go and I love to wear my watches and I am not comfortable wearing a band or a watch in my dominant hand. So, I knew when the newness of the device wears out, I'll be back to wearing watches but the newness wore out so fast that even I am surprised and disappointed… 

p.s. This post is not a promotion post or a badgering post… its just my honest opinion