Overview
What is Halo Band
Halo band is Amazon’s new launch into the fitness market. It’s a fitness band that is capable of measuring your sports activity, sleep, and body comp with a surprise feature of measuring the tone of your voice and how you sound in conversation. It doesn’t have a screen but is waterproof, swimproof, and small and fashionable.
Who is it for
The Halo is great for athletes and regular people that want to track and improve their health. The band competes with other bands like the FitBit, Whoop, and Apple Watch. The major difference between the band and other smart devices like the Apple Watch is the lack of screen. It’s just a single solid band that fits around your wrist. You can interact with it through the Halo app and it syncs with the app everytime you launch it. The lack of screen allows for longer battery life (5–7 days) and also minimizes distractions.
Why am I writing this review
I’m writing this review because I received early access to the Halo Band. I should disclose that I have not been incentivized in anyway to write this first impression and am doing it solely to share my initial experiences with the Band. I think it’s a great product.
First Impressions
Design
The Echo Band is stylish and very low-key. The band is made of a woven velcro kind of material. The back of the band is adjustable and since the entire band sticks to itself, you can really adjust it to fit your wrist. The band comes in 3 sizes small, medium, large, and 3 colors, white, pink and black. If you saw it without recognizing it you would think that’s just a wristband or any other kind of fashion accessory.
The band is pretty comfortable. It is adjustable, the tightest setting is a bit too uncomfortable for my wrist.
Charging
I think the charging cable is unique on the band, I’ve never really seen any other smart device charge this way. There is a big clip that will hold the band and is usb powered. This means you can charge it from your computer and see the battery life from your phone on the Halo app.
What’s in the box
The Halo App
Setting Up
I set up the band all in less than 5 minutes. The Halo app setup is super quick and there were minimal hassles. I did have trouble updating the band and went through that a couple times before giving up on the update. Tone control and Body composition are entirely different features that need more special setup than the overall tracking on the band. Setting up tone requires you to speak into the microphone and read off excerpts from books kinda like setting up Hey Siri on the iPhone.
I haven’t set up body composition yet, but that one does require you to take pictures and a scan of your body. I’m questioning how accurate the body composition is because it is pictures based.
iOS and Android
Halo Band does have both apps on iOS and android so if you have either an iPhone or Android phone you won’t be blocked from using the band.
Features
Sleep monitoring
Sleep monitoring is cool. I used to have a whoop and the experience is very similar. The band will tell you the different stages of sleep and how long you’ve been in it. I like how I can see the entire chart at night with the areas of REM, deep, and light sleep. One distinct feature on the band is the ability to see how long you stayed in light sleep or woke up.
At the end of the night the band will give you a rating of 0–100 on your quality of sleep. So far my sleep has been around a 50, which means that I have some area to improve on.
Tone Monitor
Tone control is the most interesting feature in my opinion. The band will listen live to a conversation and detect the tone and energy of the conversation. It will label the tone to different emotions such as happy, confident, unsure, shy and others. This is cool in theory but I can’t see myself using this alot in practice. I’m not sure if it’s because I feel like this should be basic human nature sort of observation but cool regardless.
The feature is turned off until you decide to go live on the band. I can see this as being useful for important meetings or sales conversations where the emotion of both speakers is probably more important than the conversations I’m having with my friends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7AT8gZpGX0
Heart Rate monitor
This is a pretty standard feature on most smart bands today. If you go to the heart rate tab you’ll be able to see your live heart rate in BPM and track that throughout the day. The band will also give you how many steps you take and your activity level as a rating.
Questions?
Post your question in the comments and I will try to answer them in the full review
