Testing the trackers

About a week ago I received my Pivotal Life Tracker 1 that I pre-ordered months ago, so I thought I’d finally get around to doing an official comparison with actual data and graphs and shit. I now have 3 activity trackers; the Fitbit One, Garmin Forerunner 15, and the aforementioned Pivotal band.

I’ve been wearing the FR15 and the Pivotal on the same wrist to eliminate any potential dominant arm issues (I’m right handed and both devices are on my left wrist) and the Fitbit is kept either in the 5th pocket on my jeans or clipped to the right pocket of my running shorts.

I’ve always thought that the FR15 was a bit… overly generous with the steps, it’s almost always at least 400 steps more than the Fitbit and sometimes way more. Because of this, I wasn’t holding high expectations for any tracker band, let alone a $12 band (or more appropriately, a free band with you $12 annual app subscription). Aside from some problems with the app on Christmas day and the day after, the Pivotal is tracking surprisingly close to the Fitbit.

Now, I am fully aware that this is a small data sample and it has at least 2 days of invalid data thanks to the app glitch, so I will be continuing to wear all 3 devices for another couple of weeks. I’ll also go into more detail with each tracker in separate review posts. This post is really just a quick intro and setup.