I’ve owned a Striiv since March 2012
This may get long, so bottom line
- A good deal at $30 dollars - not a great buy at over $40
- Bluetooth has a special purpose; it doesn’t use it to communicate with your computer, but with other Striivs (more on that below in ‘Racing’)
- This model does not communicate with your smart phone as other Striiv devices do
When I bought this at the full $99 it was pretty unique in the pedometer market. The game and the charitable donation were fantastic motivators for over a year. It counts stairs, which newer pedometers do, but virtually nothing in early 2012 did. As SDC100 explained the accelerometers make a much better pedometer and these were a step up to be counting stairs.
Step counting is fantastic. It counts clipped to my waistband, in my pocket, in my purse. It’s more finicky about counting stairs – you need to climb 5 or 6 before it’s sure you’re climbing them, but once your past the threshold it counts pretty well, although I find that some days I have to mess with where it’s sitting on my waist to get the best count.
In the game space you’re creating a landscape. The landscape itself provides the coin to buy the raw materials for new stuff, but to build the raw materials into the thing, the only way is to walk.
That being said, you can can get bonus build energy for the game by taking the challenges. The Challenge section has Easy-Medium-Hard challenges that sometimes give you a specific number of steps to walk to how much time to move to how many stairs to climb, etc.
You can tap into the Challenge Section or just wait. The Challenges pop up randomly when you check your device and if you take the pop up version it’s worth 3x points from selecting it. HUGE MOTIVATOR. There’s a limited number of challenges per day and completing them is also a big motivator o keep moving.
There’s another challenge option of racing three animated competitors either walking or stair climbing - this also nets you energy for the game. If you know other Striiv owners, your device can sync with their device (Bluetooth). This allows you to race each other. My housemate has one, but we walk at different paces, so never race. But there is an advantage to this feature - it adds Milestones to your day.
There are built in Milestones to the device. Once you walk a fixed number of steps you get bonus energy for the day. Some of them stay the same like climbing 354 stairs in one day gets you the Statue of Liberty bonus – whereas the Eiffel Tower bonus you have a week to complete. You accumulate the Mt Everest stairs until you get the bonus. These bonus are reset so you can always get them again.
Among the milestones you also have bonuses for beating your previous days totals, average, all time highs. There are also bonuses from beating the sync data of your friends, both their averages and all time highs.
Charitable donations are cool. Your steps and stairs and accumulate on a thermometer style gage and when you fill it, you’ve donated a polio vaccine or clean drinking water. You download a sync program on your computer and hook up the Striiv via USB. It accumulates your stats on the Striiv website including your donations.
All the bonuses go toward the game, which WAS a big motivator. There’s a point in the game where you’ve opened up all the new land and filled it completely and then the motivation slips. I’ve thought about having the device reset so I could start over, but I haven’t done it for the last year or more. Periodically I destroy a section and rearrange but it’s not as motivating to me as it once was.
Here’s what frustrates me as an early adopter:
They explained from the beginning that there initial goal had been a smart phone app, but the accelerometers in smart phones of the time weren’t quite good enough to count stairs. So, they produced a stand alone device that syncs.
There were many firmware updates in the beginning, the vast majority adding new functionality or tweaking the step/stair count as opposed to fixing bugs. They were enthusiastically responding to requests for new features.
The one feature I and many others was a dump of our data. Other $30 pedometers at the time had a downloadable sync program that stored your daily data in a little database and gave you a mini-charting program so you could compare week to week or day to day – you’re historical data.
I wanted this more in Sept 2013 when I broke my ankle and essentially didn’t move for six weeks. I would have lied my historical data to see how I was recovering to where I was before the ankle break. The website only has your lifetime totals and last days data. The device has a good display of the last 5 days and a mediocre display of the last month.
We haven’t gotten it yet and I’m betting we’ll never see it. Striiv has essentially abandoned improvements on this product. They crated a smaller wearable widget that sync’d with your smartphone (and allowed you to play games on the big screen of the smartphone) and then the got the smartphone appp. All improvements are pointed toward those devices.
(I tried the smartphone app, but gave up on it. I don’t carry my phone everywhere at work and it was terrible at counting stairs when the phone was in my pocket. Your phone’s performance might do better)
As for durability, I broke my first one in the first month under unique circumstances. I had it recharging while I was driving. I stopped for gas, got out of the car, the device stretched between the lanyard attached to my jeans and the charger and got smashed when the car door closed on it.
I don’t get what someone was doing to break 4 of them. I’e been wearing this one since April or May 2012, daily, in the garden, at work, hiking, shopping - doing everything and it’s fine.
I put a lanyard on the ring and use it unless I’m wearing pants that don’t have a belt loop. I did buy the accessory pack with the hardcase clip and use that to slip into my waistband.
Customer service was good when I contacted them about the first break.
Like I said in the beginning, it’s a great $35 pedometer, but I would never pay more than that for it. So good deal on Woot today. The sales from Striiv don’t get better than this.