Does anyone have one of these devices? Has anyone tried more than one of them? My wife wants to get one but isn't sure which one she should get.

Between my friends and I, we've all owned one of each. What is it she's interested in using it for? The only one who is unhappy is the fuelband owner, and his adjective of the device being "twattish" doesn't provide much info (mostly due to it's twitter and facebook capabilities without being able to use it with something like my fitness pal). I'd prefer my up was waterproof, had I known it wasn't I would have gotten one that is.

She mainly wants it to track her running. She's been doing a ton of research, and while she liked some of the features of the Up (like that really cool alarm feature), there were some other aspects to it that she didn't like.

I think it appeals to her that the Fuelband, even though it needs to be charged more often - is easier to charge. It's just USB. The Up and the Flex are both more cumbersome, and neither gives good feedback on the device its self, at least not anything like the Fuelband does.

Personally, I've always been a Fitbit fan, but I'd probably stick with the clip-on style for myself.

I do like that alarm clock feature of the Up, though...

For what it's worth, here's my take on gadgets, as I used and abused them during my "lose weight slow!" diet program:

. I got a FitBit and quickly gave up on it. It wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know. The MyFitnessPal app (and there are lots of equivalents), on the other hand, was quite useful. They crowd-source their data, making it very easy for you to find damn near anything. Sometimes it's hard to come up with a reasonable estimate, particularly if you're eating at a fancy restaurant where the food is creative and unusual, so you ignore it and move on. After you've been doing calorie counting for a couple months, you "get it" and don't really need the app any more.

. I used to have a home scale that tried to electrically measure your body fat. It might as well have been a random number generator. It's more important to have a scale that's accurate and has big digits I can read without my glasses. (Whoever designed the "Thinner" model I'm now using had a strong case of iPhone minimalist design envy.)

. When running, I've found my heartrate monitor (a cheap Polar unit) to be very helpful. I've learned that if I let my HR get above 170 bpm for too long, I'll be a zombie for the rest of the day. If I slow myself down to keep my HR at 160 or lower, then I'm fine. Also, lots of treadmills these days are compatible with the Polar transmitter, so if I'm stuck in a hotel gym, at least I've still got all the data on the screen in front of me.

. I keep an Excel spreadsheet, wherein I dutifully type in the date, my weight, and any data from my heart rate monitor (when running) or my stopwatch (when swimming, I separately time myself for each set). When I'm traveling, I'll use gmap-pedometer.com to map my runs, and the hyperlink goes into the spreadsheet. About once a month, I'll invent some new way to dork around with all of this data. For example, I have a lovely graph of "heartbeats per mile" over time, which you can see trending downward. It's a nice proxy for how my fitness has improved.

Now THAT is cool.

You know, there are plenty of scales that could track your weight for you. I have the first Withings scale, though I'd prefer the Fitbit one that came out later because it would integrate with the Fitbit site better.

I mostly like the Fitbit because I like having the data.

I've got a set of Withings wifi scales. They've been an important part* of my 25kg+ weight loss since last August.

They weigh me, record the weight on Withing's service, provide me with a chart of my progress, give me some nice iOS apps and tweet my weight once a week

http://www.withings.com/en/utils/graph?u...forcedisplay=fm

(apologies for the Flash)

* the more important part being finding that my body/brain enjoys fasting two days a week (where fasting == <800kCal a day)

Here's the deal. The data I enter after a typical morning's swim are:

. timings for five sets (from my $35 Timex Ironman's chronograph)

. heartrate avg and max estimates (sticking my fingers against my throat and using the pool's large wall clock to measure my pulse at the end of each set)

. weight (from the gym's scale, taken after my swim in a vague hope of being consistent in how I measure myself)

. ambient temperature (mostly irrelevant for swimming, but very important when running)

Yeah, sure, I could buy a $170 SwimSense which can somehow upload data and get into FitBit or MyFitnessPal's database, but it's unclear whether I can get my hands directly on the data for my spreadsheet. I could spend a whole lot more money on a top-end Garmin which does it all for running, cycling, swimming, etc, and again wants to upload all the data to Garmin's web site. It's just an awful lot easier to type this stuff in by hand. Plus I get to do analyses that the web sites don't do.

The fuelband lasts a week for me, but maybe that's because I don't run. I don't think I could take needing an adaptor to charge (or plugging into a headphone jack to sync), but it would be great to have a fuelband which worked a little as a phone accessory - eg vibrate notifications.

My guess is that's coming with rev2...