Review: iFit Active

Introduction and display

Everyday, electronics constantly evolve by adapting to meet our lifestyles, like health. The last years saw the rise of wearable technology, a market focused on a product designed for active humans, recording their dietary, exercising, and sleeping habits.

Besides wearing an old black Casio watch to monitor swim lap time, I've never touched a "wearable." So for an entire week and half I wore the iFit Active, a wearable that could tell the time, automatically record steps, total distance walked, the amount of calories burned, and sync via bluetooth to a smartphone with a dedicated app allowing for more detailed analysis.

ICON Health & Fitness, Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of exercise equipment, has grounded itself in specializing in treadmills, elliptical trainers, and stationary bikes. The company recently jumped into the ever-growing popular market of fitness trackers.

Enter the iFit Active, a "3-in-1 wireless activity tracker" with a conventional approach for logging your calories, steps, meals, and sleep patterns. In the broad range of fitness trackers of every fitting, the iFit Active takes a bare bones approach with its sheer simplicity through form and function without overstating itself as anything else but a tool for tracking.

It is nowhere near the immense interactivity and beautiful display of something like Samsung's Gear Fit, but instead, shines in its straightforwardness by mainly focusing on simple functionalities of logging.

The iFit Active works as a pedometer, automatically recording every step that you take as well as the distance you've traveled and the number of calories you've burned. You can manually log in how many calories you've consumed as well as record your sleep cycle. This data is sent off to its dedicated app, compiling it in detailed illustrated records. It also serves as a watch, and displays both date and day.

Design, comfort and interface

The actual unit of the iFit Active is a lightweight black little module called a "tracker pod" that can be outfitted with its included hard rubber wristband and a clip that you can fasten to your waistline or pocket.

The wristband's strap has two plastic prongs that stick into a series of holes, allowing virtually a one-size-fits-all guarantee for users. To assure the band is absolutely secure, a slider sleeves the area where the prongs are snapped in, assuring the wrist band doesn't fly off when you're running.

Comfort

The iFit's wristband feels as snug and heavy as a digital rubber watch, and overtime, becomes a second skin. If you're not much of a watch wearer, you can fasten the iFit's clip virtually anywhere on your clothes' edges (e.g. sleeves, collars, socks, pockets.) Depending on where you've placed it, the clip can become less noticeable than the wristband.

It's not recommended you hold on to just the tracker pod alone, as the little hard component can bounce around without clinging to anything. The included rubber jackets are made to assure the iFit sticks with you without having to consciously worry about potentially losing it.

Interface

The iFit Active's tracker pod has a small rectangular LED display, illuminating blue tinted text in all caps upon interaction. It functions primarily through two even buttons on its top and bottom. Press the top button to display the time, day, and date for ten seconds.

Pressing the bottom button multiple times will navigate through a selection of text sliding from the right, displaying labels for activities of calories in, calories out, steps, distance, and net calories. Leaving an activity idle drops down an associated number tied in with your selected data.

Holding down the bottom button enables a sleep mode. The iFit Active will ask if you're going to bed, and then start recording the time of your sleep. Once you wake up, you'll have to click the bottom button again, signaling you're awake, thus storing your hours slept. You can program the exact hours you plan to workout and sleep so the device knows when to start and stop. A silent alarm can be set to vibrate you awake in the morning.

You can record the calories of each meal directly through your iFit Active by pressing and holding the top button. There, a display label will read, "LOG. CAL" and you can add or minus calories in increments of 50.

The iFit Active includes a USB cable for recharging. At the end of this cable, you'll find a unique set of protrusions used to connect the tracker pod's contacts with, along with a strap to fasten it in. A full charge will take roughly six hours.

Compatibility, battery and verdict

The iFit Active is compatible with your iPhone 4S and above, iPod Touch fifth-gen and above, and Android 4.3 devices and higher. You can download the iFit Track app in Apple's App Store or on Google Play.

The iFit Active can't operate unless you first sync it via Bluetooth with the iFit Track app. The data that is stored in your iFit Active will sync up and log itself into the app, keeping a detailed record of each day's activities.

After setting up an iFit account, you'll enter your height, weight, and gender and be able to set goals for the number of steps, distance, calories burned and consumed, net calories, and sleeping time. The tracker pod will show a percentage out of 100 next to each logged number.

The app displays a wheel with dots that light up based on your calorie input and output. Your net calories display in the middle, with a list of three items below documenting a progression line of calories consumed, steps taken, and hours of sleep.

Eating a complex meal that you might otherwise be unaware of for its nutritional values can be recorded directly into the app. The iFit Active has a catalog of various popular food items that you can choose from.

This isn't always 100% accurate, since exact foods won't always match in concise nutritional values; through confident guesstimating, you'll be able to find the appropriate meal – you can always adjust the serving size too.

Each time you document a referenced meal, the iFit Track records the amount of fiber, unsaturated fat, other carbs, protein, sugar, saturated fat, sodium, and cholesterol counts. Each attribute of nutritional value will be tallied up by percentage based on the USDA's daily recommendation (e.g. "30% fiber? Have more." or "215% Sugar? Hold on, too many is not good."), keeping track of your daily intake.

You're also able to input various exercising activities directly in the iFit Track app. The "Log Workout" gives you inputs for your activity type, end time, duration, and calories burned. Unfortunately, this is more arbitrary than meal logging because there's no preset to estimate burned calories with their associated exercises.

The app also connects you to not only a dashboard and stats, but includes a friend's list for those with an iFit Active, a calendar with a detailed progression chart of every bit of recorded data, a newsfeed, and a leaderboard.

Battery life

The best attribute (and strongest selling point) of the iFit Active is its immense battery life. Under moderate usage, and conservative estimations, the iFit can last about two full weeks.

After a full week and a half of testing without ever turning it off or charging, the iFit was still kicking with a 30 percent charge. Calculated, this would mean the iFit still had about five to six days of battery life left.

Consider the conditions: My workout routine included 10 hours weightlifting at the gym every week along with light walking. Through the iFit Track app, I logged in my daily meal intakes, then synced it immediately with the iFit so it could display the correct data. Whenever a moment of exercise or diet occurred, I made sure to log it. I never took the iFit Active off unless showering or sleeping - virtually every step I took was recorded.

Where most companies might overstate their product's claims, the iFit Active underestimates its battery charges to last approximately "5 to 7 days."

Some electronics, like smartphones, are never turned off unless there's an immediate lack of outlets. The iFit takes about six hours to fully charge, and lasts long enough to reconsider the fairness of its price tag.

We liked

Though putting the tracker pod into the wristwatch casing is a bit tedious, it highlights its durability. Most collapsible gear doesn't feel sturdy once joined together, but the iFit Active always felt intact whether it was sleeved in its wristband, snug in the clip mold, or strapped in for charging.

It's a breath of fresh air that iFit Active isn't an overly complicated piece of wearable hardware that's trying to be everything. Simply inputting variables of data for calories in and calories out as well as automatically recording my steps seemed practical enough to come off as an introductory fitness tracker.

We disliked

The app wasn't reliable when syncing with the iFit Active. After the first week, the app notified me that it "Cannot Sync" and I had to give it a hard reset. After doing so, I got the same message, and again, found myself repeating the same instructions of a hard reset and then re-syncing. I gave up after the fifth time. All the data that was stored on the iFit Active over the day was now gone.

The $79 (£64.30, AU$96.49) price tag is absolutely absurd and completely unjustifiable. There are already fitness trackers on the market for $17.77 (£14.47, AU$21.70) like the iBody Oled, or the Misfit Fitness tracker for $49.99 (£40.70, AU$61.06) that deliver a lot of the same or better features as the iFit Active. Essentially the rule of thumb is that you get what you pay for, but the iFit Active is willing to make that exception.

On a lesser note, if you happen to be wearing the iFit Active outside during the daylight, it's virtually impossible to read the display. The LED light is best viewed in darker settings.

Final verdict

The iFit Active is an appropriate introductory fitness tracker in the developing market of new wearable technology, but it's the high price and sync malfunctions that ultimately bury it in its grave.

If ICON Health & Fitness, Inc. decided to scale down the retail price to be more affordable as well as fix a few bugs, the iFit Active could immensely enhance its brand as a stand-alone substitute opposed to other more overwhelming and complex fitness trackers.

For $99 (£80.58, AU$121.05) extra, you can get your hands on the well-received Razer Nabu, a sophisticated fitness tracker with a vibrant digital display that can let you know when you receive calls, texts, e-mails, and social media notifications.

The pattern of inconsistencies with the company's official estimate on battery life, a highly marked up retail price, and a lack of anticipation for sync malfunctions sadly reflects on the product in itself. A quick Amazon search and many users are also experiencing problems with syncing.

The overall feeling when dealing with the iFit Active was in itself a workout of my patience. I want it to be good, because it can be good, but it's so unfortunate how unprepared it was, as if the company was unaware of the product it was making and what it has to compete with.

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