Jawbone CEO Offers Full Refund to UP Wristband Purchasers, Halts Sales

I was so close to buying one, should have done it!

I never really looked into this product. I'm curious to know what all the issues were with the product that would cause the company to refund the item and stop producing them.

LimeiBook86 said:

I never really looked into this product. I'm curious to know what all the issues were with the product that would cause the company to refund the item and stop producing them.

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According to the letter,

With your help, we’ve found an issue with two specific capacitors in the power system that affects the ability to hold a charge in some of our bands. We’re also fixing an issue with syncing related to the band hardware.

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It's temporary. They will start producing them again once they fix the problems.

Cougarcat said:

According to the letter...

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Well that makes sense then. Thanks for the info.

Phew! When I heard about these i was worried maybe i shoulda got one instead of my FitBit. It is a shame though, they are a nifty device.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I've had one for a little over a week and really love it! I've been tracking meals, sleep, and activity in an intense diet, exercise, and lifestyle change prompted by medical condition. It's very accurate for mileage with swimming but doesn't accurately interpret the data... Dead on for walking, sleep, and upper body workout.

Only drawback was unexpected and random mode change, failure to sync, and odd battery discharge pattern.... All started happening after 6.5 days of use.

No worries though because both email and phone support helped to quickly guide reset, diagnostics, and offered overnight replacement!

This is the best device concept I've found. I do wish it was compatible with Virgin HealthMiles corporate program and made a plug at both businesses for the partnership.

-cog-

Edit to add=> I'm suspect that the issue might be software related as there is some correlation with restarting UP app, restarting iPhone 4S, and sync recovery.... Memory leak, audio/data headset jack dll??

It's a 99-dollar bracelet that vibrates from time to time, reminding you to get up from your chair. Of course people are disappointed, I could just set my wristwatch to beep every hour, for free.

baryon said:

It's a 99-dollar bracelet that vibrates from time to time, reminding you to get up from your chair. Of course people are disappointed, I could just set my wristwatch to beep every hour, for free.

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It does a little bit more then that, but ok...

baryon said:

It's a 99-dollar bracelet that vibrates from time to time, reminding you to get up from your chair. Of course people are disappointed, I could just set my wristwatch to beep every hour, for free.

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That's not really all it can do. It can do a lot more than that.

I went through 3 bands in 30 days. It's a terrible product. It's expensive for what it can do and it seems awesome but I grew tired of it after just a month.

Even when it does come back out I'd suggest that people not buy it.

LimeiBook86 said:

I never really looked into this product. I'm curious to know what all the issues were with the product that would cause the company to refund the item and stop producing them.

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They just stopped working. For many people even the 2nd or 3rd replacement did the same thing. Mine quit working after 11 hours.

Also they do a terrible job of tracking my sleep and I question the accuracy of the number of steps it says I am taking.

I am glad I will now be getting this POS of free.

I think the wristband is a great idea that just hasn't yet been executed properly.

My girlfriend and I each bought one when they came out and we both returned ours about a week and a half ago. After having it for about two weeks, the button stopped working to switch between the different modes. I had some battery issues as well. Also, IMO, the food tracker as it stands is pretty much worthless. We stopped the whole taking a picture of our food about two days into having it. The food tracker needs more detail than just, "how do you feel?" We both also found the pedometer's accuracy to be a little questionable. Checking out your sleep pattern was neat the first few times but then it kind of became, "so what?" I tried the smart alarm feature that tries to wake you up in the optimum state and I found to be no more alert or rested than before. In fact, I frequently went back to bed for the remaining 20 minutes or so before my real alarm went off because I really just wanted to sleep.

When mine broke, we ultimately decided that while it did have some neat features, like the social challenges, it wasn't yet worth it to pay the $99 each. Depending on how this product improves, I may want it in the future. (Ability to sync via Bluetooth please!) Overall, like I said, I think the idea has a lot of potential, but in is current stage isn't quite good enough. I am happy to see they know this and that they are working to improve!

Though I was on my 2nd one which just happened to croak last nite, I like the device. It was my day tracking activity device. Yeah the food tracking and the iOS app itself needed improvement. Sleep complemented the Zeo I had.

What really got me going was the integration with DailyFeats where you get points for doing stuff and after a while you can redeem it for rewards. Takes a while to get stuff, but if I'm going to do things it can sort of pay itself off (eventually).

What Jawbone did was commendable even though the product was just not ready. Hopefully they will take their time & make the product better before releasing it again. I think they got a winner on their hands. They just started horribly with it.

First I'm hearing of this thing. But I have to say... if they fix the problems and sell them in the UK I'll definitely buy one, maybe more as gifts. Sounds like (in theory) a cool little gadget.

Wow this is really surprising. The people that I know that have used this device love it.

I don't think I've driven to Target faster than I did after reading that post...

Bought two for me and my bro!

I should have done that!!!
Grrr!!!
I'll try in the morning..
Sooo... what exactly is wrong with it?

I have one & will ask for the cash

I went today to the mall and asked about them and was told they could not sell them due to defects and product will be returned (same answer from 3 separate AT&T corporate owned stores in the mall), RadioShack had none and BB neither or were removed. What they told me at AT&T was that they were ordered to removed them from sale STAT so GL to anyone wanting to get one for free. The coupon conditions state that it needs to have been bought from one of their retail partners but since no receipt is needed just the serial I don't see a problem with it if you get one form somewhere else.

Cougarcat said:

It's temporary. They will start producing them again once they fix the problems.

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They claim to know what the issue is in their release yet on their site they make it clean that they don't know when it will return so it sounds like they don't actually know what the problem is.

I went out and got one earlier today just as Best Buy was pulling them when I read the release on another site.

I had ordered one for my brother's B-Day. It arrives tomorrow. Crap, now what do I do.

skellener said:

I had ordered one for my brother's B-Day. It arrives tomorrow. Crap, now what do I do.

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Assuming you ordered it before the announcement you could:

1. Give it to your brother anyhow and get your money back.
2. Give it to your brother along with $99 (which you'll get back from the refund) so he can replace it when it breaks.
3. Return it and get your money back.

Just decide what works best.

This is the second time I've went for a product that Leo Laporte has gushed about during his broadcasts on the TWiT network — the other one was the Drobo mass-storage system.

Both turned out to be absolutely terrible products.

Makes me wonder if Leo really tries out these products before he begins telling his audience how they are the best things since sliced bread, or if it's just all about the advertising dollars.

fishmoose said:

That's not really all it can do. It can do a lot more than that.

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Well that's all that was talked about in their video, other than monitoring your food intake, which is basically "type in what you ate in your phone, and we'll ask you how you feel about it 3 hours later, and your response will determine how you feel about it", which is hardly a feature of the bracelet. Also, yeah, it monitors sleeping habits, but it won't wake you up based on your sleep patterns or anything like that "Sleep Cycle Alarm" app, so it doesn't really "do" anything other than make statistics about an accelerometer, which your phone could easily do, since it already has an accelerometer and it's already in your pocket anyway.

Received mine on 28th November worked well and was extremely useful to me,dead as a dodo yesterday.Seems Jawbone dropped a massive bollock with this,surely normal testing would have picked up the faulty capacitors.