Amazon Halo Band - Large – Measure how you move, sleep, and sound – Designed with privacy in mind - Winter + Silver

I have been using Halo for a couple of months now and there is so much to like but it feels a bit rough around the edges when compared to other more refined products from Fitbit or Samsung. I have had a number of smart watches and fitness bands over the years. I have been using a high end smart watch for the last year. The problem with that is that I cannot wear my good analog watches without looking like an idiot. Even the Fitbit fitness bands have a large digital display which looks somewhat stupid when you have a big dive watch on the other wrist. So, I wanted something small and really understated. Amazon had invited me to try Halo (paid for it but at a discount) and it looked like it might fit the bill. For the most part it does. Here are the highlights:-Hardware: Not having a screen is strange at first but I have learned to really like it. With all of our devices, it is one less thing to distract me. The device itself is lightweight aluminum that fits the wrist nicely. It has one button for resetting the device if ever needed. A double tap will resync the app and the band if you have had both connected for a bit without using. There are the typical sensors on the bottom to measure your heart rate. I got one with the silver mesh strap. I really like it but opted to buy a silicone strap as the Halo is waterproof and I like to shower without removing it. The mesh strap stayed wet too long for my liking. Amazon has some work to do on the silicone strap designs. They are all pretty ugly but they work. All and all this is a very comfortable device that you won't mind wearing all day everyday.-Software: As one would expect from a company like Amazon, the software experience is where things shine for me. It is still incomplete in some ways but you can see where they are heading and the future is bright. As it sits, it is still pretty great. There are four tabs at the bottom of the app; Data, Lab, Live, and Settings. Data is where your various stats are displayed. Those include Activity, Sleep, Tone, and Body. Let's dig into these.-Activity: Amazon is taking a total activity approach to healthy living. Less about steps though they are there if you want to see them. The idea is that your activity levels throughout the day accumulate for points. For instance, I got 50 points for a 50 minute elliptical session this morning. It automatically picks up your activities but doesn't necessarily always know what you are doing. After my workouts I just go back in and edit them if they are not properly identified. The Halo starts you out at 150 points a week as a target and moves you up as you achieve your target points. All and all it works great and keeps me motivated.-Sleep tracking: The sleep tracking is thorough and robust. Though if you are like me and sometimes fall asleep on the sofa for an hour and then go to bed, the Halo band will almost always fail to register the first hour. Seems like a simple update at some point. I like the point system Amazon employs here. It drives me to go to bed earlier and leave my TV off.-Tone: This one is a weird one. Basically, the Halo band listens to you and analyzes your tone of voice to try and measure stress and anxiety. It does actually work but I didn't really get much out of it honestly. Further, it significantly reduces your battery life. Maybe by as much as 60%. For me, I would rather have the battery life but I think this will be a highly individual experience. Some will really appreciate this new approach.-Body: Unless you are in really really good shape, this one will probably haunt you a bit but man is it effective so I really recommend utilizing this feature. Basically you set your phone down a solid ten or so feet away from you at waist height with just your underwear on. The app scans your body, captures the image, and calculates your body fat. It is fairly accurate. Maybe a little heavy handed. I am a fifty year old man that works out regularly. Let's just say, after seeing the image and the body fat percentage, I have a lot of work to do. I am extremely motivated to improve both the fat percentage and the image I am looking at in the app. I think the easiest thing to do in life is lie to yourself about how you look. This feature makes that impossible. It hurts but I really like this feature. I will absolutely get healthier because of it. I would add a word of caution here. If you are someone that has struggled with body issues in the past, you might not be right for this device. It definitely makes you more conscious of your body and appearance.The next tab at the bottom is lab. This is where I think Amazon's future in fitness has the most potential. They have partnered with dozens of companies to provide workouts, stretching, yoga, meditations, diet info, and more. I did an Orangetheory workout this morning. It was brutal. I also have been doing a two week bedtime guided meditation. It has been amazing. This is all built into your monthly subscription ($3.99) after your free trial. It really is great and provides an absolute ton of added content value. The best part is Amazon is just getting started here. With Amazon's market power, I have to imagine that Lab is going to become unbelievably valuable in the coming years. If you have been with Prime for a number of years, I can imagine a growth curve similar to that where Amazon just continues to add more value, more content, and probably more cost. I look forward to seeing this.The next tab is the Live tab. Live is simple but great and it is something I wish my Samsung Active 2 offered. You can hit the tab button and see your heart rate or your tone (mood) in real time. When I get on a treadmill, I fire up my jams, go to the Halo app, and hit the Live tab. It shows me an accurate measurement of my heart rate that updates continuously throughout my run. Its something like having a chest strap monitor on without having it on. It has helped me a great deal.Lastly, you have settings. All the typical things you might want to tweak are in there. Solid.All and all, the software experience here is very good and it is likely to get much better. Amazon gave Halo a big update not long ago, presumably in anticipation of it going on sale to the public. It received a lot of upgrades. If Amazon continues to develop and support Halo band, as I anticipate they will, this will just get better.-Battery Life / Charging: With tone turned off, I get in excess of ten days on a charge. With it on, its closer to five or six. Charging from zero-ish percent takes around two hours via a proprietary charger. It is big and I don't love it but it works. So, A for me on battery life and more like a C- on the charger itself.I will update this review as I go with more information but, for now, call me impressed. It isn't perfect. The device is a little clunky and unrefined. Tone is cool but weird. The body scan might bruise your ego a bit. I would love to see the addition of a calorie counting section on the app and a more robust tracking of actual exercise history. After all of that though, what Amazon is really focused on here are three really important aspects of your life: How active are you, how are you sleeping, and how fat you are. If we all just stayed focused on those things, the world would be a much healthier place. So, I am recommending giving Halo a shot, especially if you are sick of the connectivity a smart watch gives you. Today, it just works and motivates me. I cannot wait to see what the future holds with the Amazon Halo Band.***Update***One thing I forgot to add but is important relates to why the Amazon approach to activity is important. Most fitness bands / watches track steps. It is a solid metric. What makes Halo better is, while it tracks steps, it does so in conjunction with the effort you are putting in. So let me show you what I mean. Today, I got credit for just over 4,000 steps on my 50 minute elliptical workout. I got 51 points for it. After going about my day, showering, working, getting ready for tomorrow, etc. I have finished my day at just over 15,000 steps. However, I have only earned an additional 20 points to finish at 71 points for the day. The point is, that the Halo Band is able to weigh steps during a workout as being more valuable than steps taken running around the office or my home. You get credit for those steps but the weight is scored heavier when your heart rate is higher. Steps are good but it is the kind of steps you are taking that make the difference to your health and weight. There are other bands that do this kind of thing but I think that Amazon has executed it particularly well here. One other thing I should have added from my first go is that Halo is partnered with Weight Watchers. My wife uses Weight Watchers and she finds Halo to be incredibly valuable to her efforts. It automatically syncs your activities in your WW account so she doesn't need to track that manually any longer. Great addition for all you Weight Watchers fans. It is available through Labs.03/05/21 Update: Amazon recently released a substantial update to the band which does a number of useful things. First and foremost, it now has voice integration with Alexa that is useful. You can just ask for updates like "Hey Alexa, how many steps do I have today?" It is a nice integration. It is optional in the app. I will include a picture of the toggle above. Additionally, they have enhanced sleep tracking. It is more robust and allows you to tap your finger on your sleep grid at any point to see the time much like Fitbit does. They have also enhanced 'Discover' which allows you to more easily find new content such as workouts and meditations you might want to try. Lastly, they added a calendar sync for Tone which I do not use due to the afformentioned battery drain. However, this looks pretty neat. So, say you have "lunch with Mom" on your calendar. Halo will track your tone during that time and let you know how your tone and mood seemed during the lunch. I won't use it but it seems like a useful enhancement to a feature that is unique to the Halo band. This update is a great example of the potential this band has if Amazon continues to grow it and support it.

Here is the TLDR: I think this is a potent tool to absolutely transform your body and health. It’s priced perfectly has amazing features that almost anybody can use but isn’t really for people into hard-core fitness or athletes. If you use it as a powerful tool, you’ll see great benefits; just don’t take it too seriously. Now on to the rest of my in-depth review.To really explain this device's ins and outs, I feel I need to explain a little bit of my fitness journey so you can understand what I'm looking for in a device like this. I do this because you can decide if you are like me or not like me, which will help you understand if the Halo is right for you.So I've been on my fitness journey for exactly two years at this point. I started in Feb of 2019, but it wasn't until Aug of 2020 that I really started hitting my stride. Basically, I hired a trainer who helped me consistently track my Macros and hone my diet. I had been doing pretty good with workouts going to the gym.After several months of working with my trainer, I knew it was time for me to do things independently, as hiring a trainer for the rest of my life wasn't an option. So, in November, I let my trainer go and started doing everything on my own.All that being said, I've tried almost every device for fitness and weight loss. The Apple Watch, several other bands, as well as just using my phone. And then I saw Amazon had the Halo coming out. First, I had planned on getting a Whoop band instead, but this is much cheaper, and I thought it might be similar; and I also have great loyalty for Amazon and their devices.So all that being said, here's how it's been for the 3-4 weeks I've been using the Halo. First, battery life is great. That was a big problem I had with the Apple Watch, and I don't want to be charging this thing all the time because I need to be wearing it A LOT. Especially for sleep tracking and workout tracking. It stays good for about 4 days and recharges in 20-30 minutes. That is really great and makes it very convenient to keep it charged and wear it basically all the time.The band itself is comfortable, and after 3 days of wearing it, I forgot it was even there, which is what you want in a band. Although you wear it in a weird place, you get used to that quickly, as I said.Next, I'll talk through all the Halo's functions, which are helpful from a few different standpoints.First, activity tracking. The Halo seems to do an excellent job tracking my heart-rate and using that to track whether I've just been sitting around or whether I'm active in a workout. Based on that tracking, it gives you a score each day. The higher your heart rate for a sustained amount of time, the more points you get. It gives you a constructive goal. The nice thing here is that it will track any activity you do. At first, I was just looking at my workouts, but then I started noticing other times, like playing with my kids or going for a walk with my wife. Stuff that is normally hard to track, but the Halo does it passively, and it's nice to see how active I am throughout the day even when I'm not working out. It also shows you when you've been sedentary—IE, sitting at your desk for at least an hour. Or sitting in bed on your phone! For most people, I think this is really great. It makes things easy to see and simple.But where I'm at, I'd rather like to see how many calories I'm burning throughout the day to use that in my Fitness app to know where I'm at calorie-wise. That information is tracked, but it's hard to find and does not sync to anything, so basically not worth checking and adding into my app. If you are into hardcore fitness (IE Whoop band), you won't like this. But for most people just trying to lose some weight and be healthy, it’s probably good enough.Second, sleep tracking. I've found this incredibly accurate and really helpful. I used to use my Apple watch but had problems with battery life wearing it all night, etc. The Halo does this really well and gives a REALLY clear picture of the times I'm actually asleep, and the times I'm awake or restless. I have RLS, which makes sleep really hard for me many nights. It's something that I've been working through, and the Halo band has really helped me by giving me a clear picture of what's going on with my sleep. The downside here is they say they have ways to help you with sleep, but most of their sleep helps don't seem very helpful. But most of these "labs," as they call them (in the app), are content, so I see them adding more in the future and making them better.Third, body fat percentage tracking. This is probably the most interesting feature of the Halo device/app. It uses your phone's camera to make a 3d model of your body and estimate your body fat percentage. Having been on a two-year fitness journey, I can tell you that weight is a terrible way to determine progress. It fluctuates like crazy based on dozens of inputs (water weight, meals, bowel movements, sleep patterns, meal patterns, gaining muscle, etc.). Given all of that, body fat percentage is THE BEST way to track your progress when you are trying to transform your body. I was looking at a few solutions for this recently, and there are really 3 options. One, pay for a DEXA scan. These are medical and are very accurate, but they cost money, and you may not have a place near you that does them. Also, you wouldn't do it very often given the cost. Second, calipers. These are not very accurate, require someone else to help you, and are very dependent on the other person's skill level in using them. Finally, there have recently been many scales that scan your body as a 3D model and estimate your body fat percentage. These tend to be very expensive, and as I said above, it’s an estimate.Given these are your options for tracking body fat percentage, the 3D model is the best idea. The Halo app seems to do a pretty good job. The scan is made of my body looked somewhat accurate.However, the problem with these is it’s still just estimating your body-fat percentage. That may be something that helps or hurts you. When I did my first scan, it estimated my body-fat very high. But this makes sense given where I’m at in my fitness journey. I’ve been heavily working out to have much muscle, but I still have a good amount of fat to burn off on my body. The scan can’t tell the difference between the muscle and the fat, so it just thinks everything is fat. It’s building its guess of your body-fat percentage based on the measurements it reads and your shape. So, if you are a guy with thick arms and some fat on them, it will most likely think it’s all fat rather than muscle covered in some fat.If you JUST use this feature to track your progress and don’t get too caught up in the actual number it gives you, I think this could be a huge help. I can't tell you how many times in my journey I’ve gotten stuck on the number the scale is giving me and let it derail me for days at a time. This could do that as well, but if you just use it to track weekly progress, I think that is absolute GOLD. The app says only to scan once every two weeks, and I think that is perfect timing. My advice would be to start your fitness journey or are in the middle looking to keep going, and you should use this number as your method for tracking progress.Basically, I plan to scan myself every two weeks and use that amount my body fat percentage drops as my way of knowing how well I’m doing and what’s working. Instead of tracking my weight every week as I have been. If I can see a consistent amount of body fat drop in the app every two weeks, I’ll know the app is working well and that I’m following my plan as well.Hopefully, that helps as you think about your fitness journey and transforming your body. The only other thing I’ll say is to do it! Get this device to start your journey and change your life. It is worth all the blood, sweat, and tears you’ll face along the way. And the Halo can be a huge help and a powerful tool on that journey.