If you’re looking for a decent fitness tracker that can do the basics without breaking the bank then the Fitbug Orb may be just what you need. With plenty of colours available and range of ways to wear it, there’s a lot to like here.
The Orb keeps things simple, being a small disk shaped device with just one button and one indicator light. In the box you are given a variety of options for wearing it – a strap to wear on your wrist, a clip to place on your clothes or a lanyard to keep it on your keys in your pocket.
Fitbug claim either method of wearing should provide reliable results, though the wrist strap option is the best if you want to take advantage of all the features. The strap itself has a nice rubber texture, and is available in range of colours, as is the Orb itself. One important thing to note is that the Orb shape allows it to use a standard watch battery rather than being a rechargeable device. This should give you 4-6 months’ worth of use before you need to replace the battery, and means you have one less thing you have to remember to charge along with all your other devices!
The Orb will track your general movement and breaks it down in to steps (walking) or aerobic steps, which can be running, jogging or other any other vigorous activity. The other great feature is sleep-tracking. Tap the button 3 times and the device will enter sleep mode and will tune it’s sensors to look at your sleeping habits. In the morning you can press once more to end sleep or it will auto turn off after you move more than 50 steps. Once you’ve done some movement and had some sleep, the next step is to analyse this through their app.
The Fitbug app can be downloaded on to Apple iPhones and iPads, as well as most Android phones (Samsung, Sony, LG, HTC etc) from their app stores, it’s quite simple to set up and offers some decent insight in to your activity. You’ll see a breakdown of your steps and aerobic activity to get an idea of how you’ve moved throughout the day, and here you can also see how well you’ve slept. The Sleep section gives you a high level overview in terms of a percentage, which anything over 85% being good sleep quality. You’ll also be able to see how many times you woke up during the night, which may help you to identify and eliminate things that might be disturbing your sleep.
The connection between your Orb and the app is pretty easy to set up. You connect the two using bluetooth, once connected you can set up whether you want the two to automatically sync or whether to do it manually. We set ours to sync every three hours, although a quick tap of the button will also initiate a manual synch and update the app with your latest step count.
Also worth noting is that if you sign up and link your Orb to an online Fitbug account, you can use this as a full health tracker. The website allows you to add nutritional information such as your meals and you can create fitness plans online to help you with your specific health goals.
Overall, the Fitbug Orb is great value. It doesn’t have as many fancy options as some others, but for the price it more than delivers on the two things it claims to – activity and sleep tracking.