A while back, I got a Wakemate and was pretty gung-ho about it being a great device for monitoring your sleep and helping you feel a bit more refreshed when you wake up. I recently picked up a Fitbit as well, so as a bit of fun, I thought I’d compare the 2 devices for sleep monitoring and write up a bit of a review. Here we go.

Getting Started

Once you’ve got yourself a Wakemate ($59.99) and a Fitbit ($99.95), you’re ready to get started. There isn’t much initial setup with the Wakemate, since it just interacts with your phone. You have to pair it like any other device but that’s about it. For the Fitbit, you’ll need to actually install an app on your computer (I did it on a Mac, running OS X Lion). The app that is installed handles syncing your data when you’re in range, or when you plug the device in to recharge.

Sleep “Session” Handling

I prefer the way that you use the Fitbit for tracking sleep. It has some intelligence built into it so that when you record an “activity” overnight, it takes that as your sleep. To do that, you just hold down the (single) button on the device for 2 seconds. When you wake up, you need to hold the button down to stop your “activity” again, which I sometimes forget to do.

With the Wakemate, I need to load the app on my iPhone, make sure Bluetooth is on (sometimes I turn it off to save battery), turn on the wristband (I constantly have to turn it off because the battery life doesn’t seem very good), make sure it’s connected, then hit the button to start a sleep session (and make sure it initiates properly, because I’ve had problems with that as well. Once your alarm goes off, you need to wake up enough to enter your code to unlock your phone, then hit the “I’m Awake” button. Sometimes this can be tough if you’re half asleep

Between the two devices, I think Fitbit wins here for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s really easy (push button on, push button off)
2. No additional devices involved (doesn’t require interaction with my phone)
3. The wristband is more comfortable

Sleep Data

Both devices give you a website where you can review your data. Both devices also now have native iPhone applications which include access to your data (current and historical). The Fitbit app is a lot more full-featured, but that’s because Fitbit in general is targeting a lot more than just sleep. Here is a side-by-side comparison of data collected from each device, on the same night, wearing them on the same arm:

Wakemate Data

Fitbit Data

Features/Functionality

A big point to note here is that the 2 devices are fundamentally intended for different purposes, they just happen to cross over a certain amount. The Fitbit fundamentally measures steps (through motion) and will give you a distance and calorie approximation as well. The design of the device allows you to clip it just about anywhere on your both or clothes. The Wakemate tracks your sleep through the same mechanism, but does not give any measurement other than “movement” while sleeping. Since it is a wristband, your options on how to wear it are pretty limited. The Fitbit also allows you to view your current (for today) data right on the device (via an integrated OLED display) which is  a really nice touch. Being able to check how many steps I’ve done in a day is a great motivator to get up and do some more.

Verdict

Overall, I think the Fitbit is a better purchase, even though it’s nearly twice as much. Since it is a more general-purpose device, and since you will be more likely to wear it all the time, you’ll end up with a lot more, valuable information. With a longer battery life, simpler daily use and a more refined appearance in general, it’s just a better product.

Now that I’ve tried these, I’m really curious to see what the Jawbone UP is like…

Since I’m mostly using them on an iPhone and a MacBook Pro, I have 2 extra requirements on my earphones (in addition to sound quality etc).

1. Full remote (Play/Pause, fast forward etc)
2. Inline microphone for hands free use on the phone (and for Voice Control)

Recently, my Klipsch earbuds suffered the wrath of the TSA when they were munched in the rollers of an x-ray machine. Time for new headphones. I ended up ordering a set of ZAGG Smartbuds. At literally half the price of my Klipsch, I didn’t know what to expect, but have been so far pleasantly surprised:

• Interesting design — hang down from behind neck so you can easily take out one or the other (I normally only have 1 in at a time around the city) without them dangling all over the place.
• InvisibleSHIELD on the cables makes them less prone to tangling and apparently pretty tough.
• Microphone seems to be pretty good on calls.
• I like the right-angle/low profile plug.
• Sound quality is great (I’m no pro, but it sounds good to me and I listen to all sorts of bass/highs etc).
• I’m using the foam-style buds and they are really good at blocking out background noise if you put them in properly. Even on a plane they’re solid.
• They look pretty cool (as far as ear buds go).

But it’s not all rainbows and puppy-dogs — there are a few things which continue to bug me about these buds after a few weeks of heavy use:

• Separate volume/remote units on the cables feels overdone.
• 2 adjustment beads between volume and remote seems like overkill.
• The adjustment beads need rubber lining or something to prevent them from moving around. If I put them in a position, I don’t want them to just jiggle their way down the cable 5 minutes later.
• The volume control SUCKS. Seriously. It’s one of those generic slider/resistor type ones that will work on all audio sources. I’d rather just pay an extra $10 or something and get real up/down buttons that talk to my iPhone.
• Lots of cable to juggle (since there is “double” cable for a lot of the length, so it can do the around-the-neck thing).

Despite these niggles, I’m enjoying these buds and will continue to use them. I might end up just sticking something in the beads to prevent them moving around, and the volume control is I guess survivable (but annoying).

Picture by yoavf

When I was picking them up from Nomadic Outfitters here in San Francisco, the woman who was serving me said that back to the manufacturer, they were sold out of size 44′s, and everything black (for males). She also described them as being ”like drugs” and said that once people are hooked, they want more, more MORE. She said she had one guy come in and buy 10 pairs. Apparently he sold them on eBay at $140 a pair (a ~$60 premium).

Initial Wearing

When I first put them on, the shoes felt weird, but “cozy”. I didn’t have any immediate pain/discomfort, but I was only wearing them for shorter periods. There was a distinct feeling of walking around barefoot, yet still feeling protected. It took some getting used to when walking around downtown or somewhere where I was quite conscious of the idea of walking in that area barefoot.

Krav Maga

After being warned that I should “take it easy” while I was getting used to my new shoes and the new style of walking they encouraged, I made the rookie mistake of wearing them to a couple of consecutive Krav Maga classes. I found they had lots of grip, almost too much (on rubber floor pads), and that it felt quite weird (almost unsafe) to have separate toes gripping/flexing independently. The day after I wore them, my calves and butt-muscles burned and felt super tight.

Camping

I’d heard that people went hiking in their Vibrams, but I wasn’t ready to go that hardcore just yet. I was going camping though, so I took them along  to try them out. They performed pretty much as expected; They were not warm (not wearing socks), I could feel more sticks, stones etc, and my actual feet got wet very easily from dew on the grass. On the flip side, they provided great traction, even in mud/on stones and allowed me to feel more directly connected to the Earth. They also made it much easier to feel your contact with the ground and walk quietly/carefully (while still protecting your soles from sticks and things stabbing into them).

Out & About

The last test is what they’re life for “everyday wear”. I get lots of stares & looks from random people. They look at my feet, then up to me. Back to my feet, then back to me. Your shoes are now DIAMONDS. Sorry, I got sidetracked I get people asking me “are they shoes” and wanting to know about them, so I end up being a traveling marketer. Great advertising for the brand I guess. People ask about if my feet hurt, if they protect my feet, etc etc. Oh, and I have also most definitely been approached/hit on by girls in a bar, based purely on the shoes

I’d recommend giving them a shot, especially if you have the flexibility to wear them around quite a bit (e.g. if they’d be acceptable at your place of employment). The biggest downside I’ve noticed is that my feet smell absolutely horrible when I’m wearing them, and I haven’t found a way to remedy that just yet.

Balsamiq Mockups

Mockups is the first product from Balsamiq and is their flagship release. It’s a relatively simple wireframing tool that does one thing, and does it well. It’s built in Flash and is available online (via your browser), as a plugin for Confluence, JIRA and XWiki, or as a desktop product, powered by Adobe AIR. It produces hand-drawn-looking documents that are true to the “rough” nature of wireframes, while providing a consistent feel and the ability to easily edit your wireframes as you refine them.

Sample wireframe - a wiki layout

First of all, let’s have a quick break-down of some of the good and not-so-good features of Mockups:

What’s Cool

• Minimalist UI allows you to just Get Things Done.
• Keyboard shortcuts (especially “/” to add a new element to your canvas) speed up your workflow
• Consistent elements mean consistent wireframes (no more mish-mash of elements from different stencil sets)
• Smart elements resize where they should and not where they shouldn’t!
• Simple syntax for providing realistic placeholder data on certain elements (including a magic Lorem Ipsum generator for paragraph text)
• Export as PNG for sharing (where’s the export as PDF?)
• Built in Adobe AIR, so it’s cross-platform
• XML-based file saving means there’s potential to build out tools based on these files (automatically-generated HTML output?)
• Incredibly attentive and passionate support from Peldi via GetSatisfaction
• Ability to lock elements in place (e.g. Browser Window) so that you don’t keep dragging it around by mistake

What’s Not As Cool

• Sometimes the focus doesn’t go to the Quick Add field when you hit “/” (because it’s on something else?)
• Printing support is a little kludgy, and doesn’t allow printing over multiple pages (always resizes to fit on a single page)
• Occasionally, adding something will turn the background dark gray, and won’t add the element properly (Edit > Undo and then File > Save will get around this)
• No font choices, and it uses Comic Sans by default (see extended discussion about this)
• Built in Adobe AIR, so you need to have that installed to run it
• No ability to create linked wireframes (yet, but they’re coming)
• Occasional freeze-ups (switching to another app and then back to Mockups often seems to fix this)

My Experience

As I mentioned at the start of the post, I came across Balsamiq Mockups while I was searching desperately for a replacement wireframing tool that I could use on a project with a looming deadline. One of the things that really sold me was the ability to try the software out right there and then – literally – without even downloading and installing it. Because Mockups is written in Flash, it’s deployable online, and Peldi offers you the ability to try it out (without the ability to save your files) right there on his site. I tried it out and fell in love, so I immediately bought a license.

Once I’d downloaded the “Desktop” version (which as I mentioned runs under Adobe AIR, so it’s cross-platform), I installed it and was up and running very quickly (I already had AIR installed so things went even faster). Everything went along well and I got my wireframes done with plenty of time to spare when disaster struck. For some reason, I couldn’t export PNGs to send to my client!

I jumped on the Mockups support forum at GetSatisfaction and checked, but couldn’t find anyone else having similar problems, so I posted my cry for help. Within a few hours, Peldi had contacted me, identified and fixed my problem, and refunded my license fee for the trouble. WOW. I mean WOW! When was the last time any other company did that for you? I think that’s a perfect example of amazing customer service, and it’s things like that which will keep customers loyal. Maybe I’m no longer a paying customer (although I was for a while there!), but here I am writing a blog post, telling you that if you need to do some wireframing, Balsamiq Mockups is something you should check out.

The Good

• The operating system is much snappier and more responsive overall. The phone just feels a lot faster than the E61.
• The new 5 way navigation key absolutely rocks compared to the little joystick on the E61. The only thing I don’t like is that perhaps the outside edge (“arrows”) could be a little bit wider to make it easier to hit with the end of a finger.
• Connecting to and using EDGE seems a LOT faster.
• Wifi connect time and bandwidth/throughout also seems a lot faster.
• Web pages render and respond a lot quicker (scrolling etc)
• I like that when the phone is “asleep”, if you hold down on the middle button, the screen shows you a large clock for a brief period (including icons for any messages, missed calls, etc)
• From the Home Screen, you can start typing the name of a contact and they will appear in a list so you can just select them from right there.
• You can also dial letters now, which was a frustration of mine with the E61. If, for example, you needed to dial 1800FLOWERS, there was no way to do that on the E61 without figuring out what “FLOWERS” is in numbers, which is hard because you don’t have a normal phone keypad, you have a QWERTY keyboard instead. On the E71 you can dial 1800FLOWERS and it will figure it out.
• After a quick download of an iSync plugin from Nokia I was able to synchronize my Calendar and Contacts to my Mac Address Book/iCalendar.
• Google make a version of their Gmail App specifically for Symbian 60 series devices (e.g. the E71) and it’s really slick.
• Google’s Map application is also available for the E71 and detects and uses the GPS device automatically. It’s awesome. It won’t give you true turn by turn directions, but you can plot out a course using the directions feature on Google Maps, then follow along using the GPS to achieve almost the same result.
• I also tried out qik (over wifi) and it worked like an absolute charm. Simple set up, easy streaming, decent quality. I was very impressed.

The Not So Good

• The operating system, although responsive, is still just as confusing/non-user-friendly as it always has been, if not a little more so. The menus have been moved around a little and things have been re-classified to make them even harder to find.
• I felt like the vibrate feature is a bit weak. I rely a lot on my phone’s vibrate (rather than a loud, obnoxious ring-tone) and found that I quite often missed calls unless I was sitting down (so it was pushed to my leg) or somewhere really quiet where I actually heard my quiet ringtone.
• It took a lot of poking around in the menu to figure out how to customize the 2 softkeys on the Home screen
• As usual with recent Nokia phones, to use the voice-dial command you have to master talking like a robot, and can’t just record a voice-tag against a contact and use that.
• I couldn’t figure out how to customize the middle button (between the volume up/down buttons) at all. That seems like a good button to be a shortcut to the camera.
• The Automatic Network Selection algorithm on this phone seems to be quite aggressive. I noticed my handset changing quite frequently to another network because my signal got too weak.
• I tried out Quickoffice, which is included with the handset. It is absolutely painful to try to create even a tiny, simple spreadsheet on

As a side story, I’ve been quite sick for the past few days, and spent most of my time either on the couch, or in bed. During that time, I used the E71 to browser the web, check email and send SMS messages a lot for 2 days without charging it at all. I was impressed that it stood up to that much usage with wifi, as the E61 tended to drain the battery quite quickly if you stayed connected too long. It was good to have a device like this handy to keep me at least a little bit connected (even if my mind was thoroughly disconnected!).

All in all I’ve been very impressed with the E71 thus far, and will be very sad to have to return it. Everyone else who has seen the phone has been impressed by its design, and by the features I’ve mentioned (usually GPS, internet access, email etc). It’s been described as a “sexy BlackBerry”, an “iPhone with a keyboard” and “sweeeet”, amongst other things. I’d have to agree with all of those descriptions.

Congratulations on another solid phone Nokia – now please spend a little more time on refining the software/UI side of things if you’re hoping to compete with the likes of Apple!

Unboxing

I took a few snaps while I was opening the delivery, and of the phone when I first got it, also comparing it to my current Nokia E61 handset. In addition to the handset, they also sent me a Nokia BH-602 bluetooth headset to try out (as you’ll see below).

Exterior

As soon as you lay your eyes on this phone, you’ll see it’s a sexy little number. It’s got a very similar form factor to the iPhone, although obviously there is a full keyboard in play here, so the screen is a lot smaller relatively speaking. Let’s check out a few of the things I noticed immediately:

1. Uber-hot chroming/shiny-ness all over
2. Dimpled stainless steel back-cover
3. Much more compact (read: smaller) keyboard than my E61
4. New keys! There are new keys which looking at the icons are (L-R): Home, Calendar, Contacts, Mail. The E61 had a weird “menu” key and a Mail key only.
5. Thinner and narrower, but same height
6. The screen appears to be slightly smaller (but when you turn it on, it’s crisp and sharp and very bright)
7. External access to the memory card slot and a mini-USB port
8. They’ve switched the volume up/down buttons to the other side of the phone
9. There’s not one, but TWO cameras on the device. One on the back (with an LED flash and a small mirror for “MySpace photos”) and one on the front, I assume for video calls.
10. The E61′s kinda poky joystick has been replaced with a nice big square key, surrounded by a single, connected directional key for L/R/U/D.

Gettin’ Dirty

Once I’d gotten over how much sexier this handset was than my current one, it was time to play around with it a bit and see if the actual experience of using it lived up to the exterior (never judge a book by its cover and all that).

One of the first things I noticed was that the screen was very crisp, and the colors were sharp. I’m not 100% sold on the font selection on the device, but generally the visual side of things is an improvement over the E61. All the icons got an update, but I actually liked the older, angled versions a bit better. Some of the color selections for highlighting things (black with a red outline?) are a bit odd as well on the theme that was active when I got it.

As far as responsiveness goes, the E71 blows the E61 out of the water. Going back now and comparing the 2 makes it feel like the E61 is running in a bucket of molasses, trapped in a time-warp where everything goes in slow motion. I really can’t stress the difference in speed that’s evident doing anything and everything on the phone. The E71 is quick, smooth, and jumps from task to task without a pause. Even when you leave a bunch of applications running it still seems to handle itself better than the E61 with nothing running.

The keyboard, although smaller than on the E61, actually feels better. It took a little getting used to but the new key style is more responsive and the tactile feedback is much nicer than the squishyness on the E61. There are a few compromises made to get the keyboard smaller though; namely the removal of the right shift key (makes it tricky to do shift+@/x/c because they’re so close). They’ve also moved a few special characters around (or hidden them off in the character selection menu somewhere) which is a pity, because I often use double-quotes (“) and ampersands (&) and both of these got sidelined.

Having a camera back on my phone is a treat that I’d learned to live without. The E61 was an “enterprise” device, so they decided that it didn’t need a camera on it (the E61i released shortly thereafter fixed that mistake), so I haven’t had a cameraphone for almost 2 years now. I was quite surprised with the quality on the camera – it’s decent, but not quite as good as I remembered 3 megapixels to be honest.

Here’s a couple of sample pictures to show you what it can do (click through for full-sized versions). L-R are: Inside, overhead incandescent lighting; Outside, mid morning, natural lighting; At night, with the LED flash only.

Other than that, a lot of the features are the same or similar to the E61, so I’ll post a bit more of a comparison once I’ve played with it more. I am supposed to return the handset after the new year unfortunately. I already really like it, and am finding myself enjoying it a lot more than my E61.

More to come closer to return-time, stay posted.