Jawbone Gets Back Up For The Second Time

You might remember when Jawbone announced the promising UP wristband that resembled what Nike was doing with their FuelBand just last year. However, the hardware design was subpar and ended up being recalled and Jawbone offered a "No Questions Asked" refund to all of its customers. 

Now, they're back at it again with the Jawbone UP 2.0 that features a much better redesign in both the hardware as well as the software. The main issue users had with the old UP was that water would sneak into the band itself and cause mayhem on the circuitry, leaving you with a dead or twitchy wristband. For some odd reason, Jawbone didn't think users would be "bending and playing" with the UP as much as they had planned, which led to more circuit board issues such as cracking. 

To redeem themselves, Jawbone has improved the overall bonding of the UP wristband and has upgraded their circuit boards with much more flexible versions. By decreasing the number of joints and exposed areas on the UP, it should reduce the number of problems users have experienced in the past version. 

On top of hardware, the iOS app got a nice makeover too. Featuring sleep tracking, smarter calorie counters and even some push notifications to recommend some jogging on your lazy days. 

These redesigned wristbands will be available for $129 and will be on sale immediately on their website. They are currently only available in black but will come in 8 different flavors later on. 

The Jawbone Up Is Dead

Remember Jawbone's uber stylish, waterproof wristband fitness and sleep tracker? Yeah... We've also forgotten about it. To help jog your memory, Jawbone's Up was short lived due to a massive fault with each and every Up device having its internal rechargeable battery fail after only a few days of use. After issuing a total recall which we must say, Jawbone admirably handled and controlled the situation by promptly refunding its early adopters, or what felt like a bunch of beta testers, and letting them keep their dead fashion gadget accessory to boot.

Since that very day, Jawbone ceased to sell the Up and put up a notice saying that the Up will be coming back. But after nearly a year of waiting for Jawbone to get their act together, the Up band was a no show. We only think it would be fair that we would be unofficially deeming the Up dead and gone.

But not for good. We expect the all-new and much improved, Up 2.0, to make a come back at CES 2013. Obviously Jawbone has had more than enough time to not only learn from its past mistakes, but to also catch up to some of the new fitness tracking devices that have made their way into the fitness conscience part of the tech world - post Up. We're thinking the purported Up 2.0 will bring with it a show-thru dot-matrix LED time, calorie and step activity stat display - a la Nike FuelBand, along with Android and Windows 8 mobile support at the least. Until then, you might want to check out some new fitness tracking gadgets like the recently announced Fitbit One.