I was really excited to try out the Sona; the band's elegant rose-gold accents and white leather strap looked so classy that I wanted to put it on immediately. However, it was so difficult to close the band's clasp that I nearly gave up. That's because I didn't notice, until Caeden spelled it out to me with a six-step visual aid, that the clasp had to be pried open and that the free end of the band had to be looped through the hinge. The way I had been closing the strap had it loop inside itself, making the peg-and-hole mechanism hard to see and almost impossible to reach.

I asked a Caeden spokesperson for the reason behind this awkward design, and he explained, "The Caeden team designed Sona to look like a bracelet/piece of jewelry. The clasp that comes with the leather band is similar to a standard metal watch clasp, and they wanted it to be discreet."

A screenshot of the visual aid Caeden sent me.

A standard metal watch clasp snaps on with a simple press, though. It doesn't require you to set up the enclosure yourself. Also, you shouldn't have to remove the whole wearable from your wrist to tighten or loosen the strap, which is what you'll have to do with the Sona.

That frustrating clasp aside, the Sona was also tedious to set up and pair with my iPhone 6s. I had to lift the strap from the module's housing to press a button under it. On my review unit, it wasn't easy to tell if I had pressed the button hard enough. It didn't even feel like a button; there was no real travel or a click or light to tell me that I had actually pressed it. So when I failed to pair the Sona to my phone, I couldn't tell if it was because I had missed the button, if the device's battery was depleted or if it wasn't strapped on firmly enough for the heart rate monitor to detect my pulse. The latter is one of the conditions that has to be met before you can link it to your phone -- as in, you have to be wearing the Sona and it needs to find your pulse.