Lumo Lift Review - App, Performance, Battery Life and Verdict Review
App, Performance, Battery Life and Verdict
This tiny fitness tracker monitors posture and can be worn on your clothes
Sections
- Page 1 Lumo Lift Review
- Page 2 App, Performance, Battery Life and Verdict Review
Lumo Lift – App
Companion apps for activity trackers are as important as the hardware, and while the iOS-only Lumo Lift app certainly makes data easy to digest, there are question marks over the data tracking and how effectively it analyses that information.
Syncing with the Lift is done over Bluetooth 4.0, and it’s a pretty simple process getting everything set up. Once inside, the misty blue user interface is dominated by two large circles. The first is there to indicate posture state and the second to illustrate how active you’ve been. Tapping the posture data circle generates a log of your good posture hours, and the active circle provides your step count versus step goal, along with distance and calorie count.
A tap on the small arrow below the circles brings up posture data broken down into hours,
which can also be viewed in the menu tab. Here you can also adjust
profile information.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t really break down activities such as running, cycling or gym, instead giving those periods of exercise an ‘active’ score. It’s the same with posture. It’ll simply tell you whether you’ve been slouchy or your posture’s been remarkable. Everything feels very general and casual.
Coaching sessions are the Lumo Lift’s big play here. They allow you to set up timed posture monitoring, whether it’s for 5 minutes, 15 minutes, one hour or four hours. Throughout that session, the sensor will buzz when your posture drops and won’t stop buzzing until you correct it. When the coaching session ends, it’s not all that easy to find out where the data goes and how it’s used to make improvements.
The app itself is basic as well. Perhaps too basic. There’s no third-party app support or social sharing to speak of, either. While Lumo claims to offer personalised recommendations to help fit more activity into your day, we’ve seen no evidence in our time using it.
Lumo has since introduced a new desktop application for Windows and Mac, although that requires purchasing an additional dongle, similar to the one you have to use to sync Fitbit data to a desktop computer. Amazingly, it costs $19.99, which seems a ludicrous amount to spend to view data away from your phone.
Lumo Lift – Performance
Using the Lift is a little disappointing, if we’re being honest. From an activity-tracking perspective, we were left a bit sceptical about the data gathered, especially when we found it tracking movement inside a car on occasions. Against the Jawbone UP24, step count and distance covered were in the same ballpark, but information just doesn’t feel meaningful when you get back to reviewing progress.
Prior to the latest update, when you’re not using the coaching session, the lack of any form of prompt to correct things is odd. Thankfully, there’s a new alert to offer something in line with the Garmin Vivofit’s inactivity bar or even the Jawbone UP24’s vibration alarms, to do a much better job of giving you a nudge during the day.
It’s difficult to really know how accurate the posture monitoring is, as there’s no other product to really compare it to. What we did find is that even during those coaching sessions, we felt like we were correcting our posture to stop the buzzing, but on occasions it just didn’t seem to register, no matter how much we sat up and straightened those shoulders.
If the goal of the Lift is to get you to think more about posture, we’re not sure it does and needs to do much more to take advantage of its most interesting feature.
Lumo Lift – Battery Life
The Lift will get you through five days, which is about the average battery life you can expect from most activity trackers – although the likes of the Misfit Shine (one year) and the Jawbone UP24 (two weeks) can go much further.
You’ll really struggle to push it beyond the five-day barrier, and the lack of a battery status warning makes it all too easy to not realise it’s run out of power. The good news is that it only takes two hours to power back up inside its small docking cradle, which magnetically snaps the sensor in place.
Should I buy the Lumo Lift?
The concept of monitoring posture means the Lumo Lift offers a unique layer of biometric data that no other tracker can offer. It works well and the addition of prompt alerts makes it more useful on a day-to-day basis.
However, questions marks over data accuracy and the lack of core activity tracking features – such as water resistance and sleep tracking – means there are more comprehensive tracker options in the Lift’s £100 price range. Until this type of technology can actually be built or woven into
clothing, it’s going to also have the problem of being easily left
behind.
If you’re looking for something at a similar price, offering similarly discreet tracking, the Jawbone UP24 or even the Withings Pulse O2 are more convincing options.
Verdict
The Lumo Lift is a beautifully designed activity tracker, let down by some questionable data and fewer features than similarly priced competitors.
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