Striiv Smart Pedometer/Tracker

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Striiv Smart Pedometer/Tracker
Price: $29.99
Shipping Options:: $5 Standard OR $10 Two-Day OR $20 One-Day
Shipping Estimates: Ships in 1-2 business days (Friday, Aug 29 to Monday, Sep 01) + transit
Condition: New

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Best Buy reviews

Need support? Check out Striiv’s customer care and solid reviews (4.0 out of 5.0) over at amazon

Does anybody here at woot has actual experience with this? - Due to the games and charity donations would like to buy one as a gift to a person needing motivation.

But a lot of the newer reviews in Amazon complain about reliability

Here’s one from June:

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars Such a great idea and so poorly executed., June 5, 2014
By Shandon Armstrong (Reno, Nv) - See all my reviews
Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This review is from: Striiv Smart Pedometer, Basic Bundle (Sports)
This is my second review on this product with the same disappointment.

My previous review said:

"The device is pretty expensive compared to it’s competitors, so I was expecting a lot. However, it broke very quickly and easily, and when I emailed them about it, it took 3 days for a response and then they said all they could do was offer a 30% discount on a new one.

I love the concept and the design, but I think they have some kinks to work out before they can charge $100 for one. Either that it doesn’t break or that they can replace the ones that do.

Good luck!"

They responded to that and had me send my pedometer back to exchange for a new one. I have had to do that 3 times now! I’m on my 4th device, which is just ridiculous. The one I have now has been broken one and off for the entire time I have had it- it will turn on and work for a couple of days and then freezes up for a couple weeks. It’s super frustrating and unreliable.

The concept of it is so great and I wish there was a way to make it reliable, but at the end of the day, we get pedometers in order to track our steps and help with our fitness goals. It needs to be a consistent device that we can use everyday or else it isn’t what we need when looking for a pedometer. And my information has not transferred with each new device like they say, so my all time totals and averages do not track. I’ve had to start over way too many times.

I’ve also contacted customer support so many times and they just told me “You can buy a new one for 30% off with the Father’s Day sale”. They have definitely only been friendly and helpful on Amazon.com.

It’s time to switch brands, and it was probably time a year ago. But I just wanted to support them so badly! In fact, when I bought my original one, I purchased 2 additional for my two best friends, and both of them are having the exact same problem. One is on her second device and one is on her third. Mine is obviously not an isolated problem and it’s something they are aware of. It’s a shame, but there are apps that track steps and give to charity and people can’t be expected to buy a new $100 device every 3 months.
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They use to give out Pedometers in McDonald’s Happy Meals. I wonder if this is equal or better than those.

I wonder if the device is hackable. …

I have one. Full disclosure, it was given to me for review.

It’s a lot bigger than a fitbit or fitbug, so it’s not as easy to carry around anywhere but your pocket. However, the game/charity aspect is really very very cool.

For the Woot price, it’s totally worth it, but I agree with the other reviewers who don’t think it’s worth a full $90.

These are by far better in every way. The free ones basically count the amount of time a weight bob up and down. Each bounce presumably represents a step. Cheap ones don’t even allow you to adjust the tension spring, which determines how easily the weight moves (aka sensitivity). That means it may miss some steps, or measure some steps twice, depending on how “bouncy” you are. They also often lack extras like distance traveled, calories burned, etc, which need programmability (i.e. your stride length, age, weight, etc).

This device uses a 3 axis accelerometer to measure movement in 3 dimensions. It also employs filters to determine what movements are steps, and which are irrelevant. And of course, this is a true computer which has all kinds of apps for tracking progress and motivation. Furthermore, it has a USB port to transfer data to your computer.

If you don’t need all this electronic wizardry, you can get very good model for about $10.
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Can anyone confirm whether this has Bluetooth or not? I see that it has a USB port. Thanks!

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.

I had one in 2013, it was a FANTASTIC motivator. the challenges and donations as well as the game got me moving a LOT more than this fitbit clipped to my bra has done in the 5 months I’ve had it. I kinda miss the challenges. I ended up washing it for a second time (dried out just fine in a bag of rice, took about a week) and decided it was a sign, I just didn’t remember to take it out of my pocket :frowning: but I found it mostly accurate and the size was good (except the whole washing machine part)

No, no bluetooth.

Thanks for this very thorough and honest review. I decided to pick one up because I was interested in the challenges. I did the Fitbit thing for a while, and found that while my data was syncing to the web, I never went to the site. I think that having all the motivation on the pedometer itself will be far more useful to me, even more than a phone app which would require me to have my phone around.

For $30, I found it hard to say no.