The Sony SmartBand, first shown off at CES this year, has arrived. The wearable wants to monitor your life, accompanied by an app that works with many Android phones. We’ll be strapping this to our wrists for a week or so, but our first look at the device has us excited to give it a shot.
The actual band is comfortable, made of a fairly soft rubberized material (which picks up lint really easily). Softer than the Garmin VivoFit we reviewed a while back, it’s comfortable around the wrist. The small lifelogging device, dubbed Core, serves as the mother brain here, and sits easily inside the band. The overall design is sleek, stylish, and minimal. Aside form the bright aluminum clasp, this is one smooth wrist strap.
Sony’s SmartBand app offers back-end support, cobbling your data into something you can understand. The app will let you decide which activities to track, too, making the strap as much or little as you need. We will note it doesn’t work well with any device, though, even those it should. Though it was noted as downloaded on a Moto X, it wasn’t on the device at all — same goes for the HTC One (M8). We’ll look to resolve this issue, but it’s a major concern upfront.
For now, we like the svelte styling and lightweight form factor. It’s comfortable to wear, and easy to like. Once we get our software issue resolved, we’ll make sure to give it a full review.
have you installed smart connect? The smart band won’t show up on your app drawer, it shows up under the smart connect app.