6 / 10

Design

The Microsoft Band is an aggressively ugly piece of personal technology. It would be so in any era. If a digital watch with this design had been released in 1977 it would have been laughed straight out of the roller disco. As a medical-grade research device in the mid-1990s it would have been scorned as a little rough around the edges. As a smart watch and fitness tracker in 2015, in an era with devices like the Apple Watch adorning more fashionable wrists, it's a disgrace.

It's not just outwardly dull -- though with a straight black design, a tiny colour touchscreen and a rubberised matte finish like a dusty squash ball it certainly is. No, it's actually physically awkward. It comes in three sizes, though none seemed to fit us exactly. In any case the screen side of the band is extremely rigid and thick, and it makes itself uncomfortably conspicuous in whichever orientation you choose to wear it. The band sits on your wrist rather than around it, to the extent that wearing it outside of the gym just seems a little bizarre, as if you're taking part in a medical experiment more than a normal, data-rich life. It's like wearing a manacle more than a piece of jewellery.

The good news is that heart-rate tracking (built into the clasp side of the Band) works in both orientations. It also has simple hardware buttons -- one to turn it on, the other to start an action or for Windows Phone uses to call up the voice assistant Cortana.


The clunky design is also fairly rugged, and while Microsoft says the Band is only just "splash proof" we (accidentally) wore it in the shower quite often, and the Band didn't seem to notice. The 1.4-inch 320 x 106 pixels screen is surrounded by a thick bezel, and the touch response is not tremendous, but it's bright in most light conditions, and displays colours ably.

Finally, we should mention that the band charges with a magnetic proprietary cable which works well, but which you could easily lose if you don't pay attention.

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Microsoft

Fitness

If you don't actually look at the Microsoft Band, it has a lot going for it in terms of tech. Packed with 10 sensors including the aforementioned heart-rate sensor, a three axis gyrometer, GPS, a skin temperature sensor, a capacitive sensor, a microphone, a galvanic skin response sensor and an ambient light sensor, the potential is there for this to be a very comprehensive medical device. To help process this the band has 64MB of internal storage and an ARM Cortex M4 MCU processor.


The upshot of this is that in its out-of-the-box form, the Band is a very comprehensive fitness tracker. It can do all the basics -- running, cycling, gym workouts and day-to-day steps, 24-hour heart rate monitoring and more, perhaps not the same data-rich extent as a dedicated pro-level Triathlon watch, but not far off (except for swimming, of course...) As a run partner it will keep itself to itself, showcasing key stats in a customisable array on demand but not barraging you with information you don't need. In other exercise modes it's pleasant to have around, though perhaps less useful depending on whether your chosen exercise is covered by the offered settings (and whether you remember to switch between modes mid-gym session).

Microsoft

The Band can sync with Strava and Runkeeper, and also provides a series of 'guided workouts' which combine with videos on your phone from various partners like Nuffield Health. It will also track your sleep in the vaguely ambiguous movement-based style of other mainstream wearables, plus the more-useful heart rate monitor, and has a built-in alarm, though oddly turning off the alarm doesn't "end" sleep, you have to do that manually.

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To access all of this information you have to use the Microsoft Health app (iOS, Android and Windows Phone) and sync the band via Bluetooth. The Health app itself is a little basic, but it's (pleasingly cross-platform) with a good web equivalent (strangely there is no Windows 8.1 app) and helps you keep track of most of your key stats.


We tested the band in a variety of settings, including shorter runs, gym trips and mixed-use exercise sessions. In a stiffer test WIRED wore it to run the entire London Marathon. Unfortunately the extended burst of effort needed proved too much for the device, and while we regularly got two days use out of it the Band gave up in this instance after three hours of hard graft around London's streets. Was this a one-off? Probably, but it was a let down. The resultant GPS map was also pretty straggly and did not align closely to the route except in a broad impressionistic sense.

Microsoft

Notifications

Notifications and voice control for your Android, iOS or Windows Phone device represents the other big feature set for the Microsoft band. As you may have guessed, it is the least essential and ultimately least successful. The interface is based on the same tile concept as Windows Phone. Here your apps are all square tiles arranged in a long horizontal line up to 13 tiles long. You can customise which ones appear and where, but all are coloured to match the same accent shade you select to match your wallpaper.

Once set up properly the band will show your incoming messages and calls, emails and calendar notifications. You can reply to these with presets or even, adorably, via an absolutely nano-scale keyboard which broadly speaking... works. You'll never use it, but you may appreciate the effort in a pinch. Facebook, weather, finance and Twitter updates can also be integrated into the device, while Notification Centre handles everything else that pops up for your attention on your phone.

The difficulty with this area of the Band's usefulness, however, is that in practice it's too fiddly, and the display too awkward, to make sense. WIRED found it hard to navigate and keep track of notifications on busy work days, and responding to them was an exercise in frustration. There are management options to help -- you can set up a VIP list to restrict notifications to certain people for instance -- but we never found the sweet spot where notifications became helpful and useful rather than just an annoyance we eventually switched off.


Conclusion

The problem with wearable devices of all kinds is that while they come in all shapes, colours and forms, and lie across a broad quality spectrum, they are all -- ultimately -- judged on a pass-fail basis: do you actually want to wear it every day? And for this reviewer, in the case of the Microsoft Band, the answer is no.

This device is just too ugly, uncomfortable and difficult to love as anything other than a basic running companion to consider as a permanent addition to my life.

Despite this, there are some things to recommend about the Band. Compared to the Apple Watch, it's cheap. Compared to basic fitness trackers, it packs more technology into a more fully-featured package. And as a sign that Microsoft genuinely has ambitions in health, rather than just wearables as a (sigh) "space", it's an intriguing little gadget. Just not one we would recommend spending actual money on in 2015. It feels instinctively like something Microsoft will try once and kill. Then again, as the resurgent company has shown with the Surface, with a couple more iterations it might just have something here.