Sony SmartBand SW10

In the great pantheon of activity trackers (and it’s quite a crowded one at this point), there are those that focus on style, those that focus on metrics, and those that focus on bells and whistles.

And then there’s Sony’s new SmartBand SW10, whose modest ambition is simply to track every little thing you do ever. It’s a game that cannot-and-should-not-be won.

It’s Sony’s first real foray into the activity tracker game. It’s a pod that fits into a band, which communicates with an Android app and logs your life.

Good news is the SmartBand SW10 is the most comfortable wrist-worn activity tracker.

It looks like a thick, nondescript black rubber band (green is also available). But the brains aren’t really part of the band.

Easily pop-outable is the core, a small pod with a single button and a micro USB port on it. This is where the tech is. Inside are the accelerometer, battery, and Bluetooth radio. No altimeter, no screen. There are, however, three LED lights that can help tell what mode you’re in. Kind of.

And here’s where things start to unravel. What it promises is that it “lets you keep track of everything you do”. This is done via Sony’s Lifelog app. The app is a colourful display of all the data the band collects merged with data that your phone collects.

So not just your steps, your sleep, and your estimated calories burned, but also information about when you were listening to music, calling people, or messing around on the web. All that crammed into a visual timeline of your life. It’s ambitious.

It also doesn't work worth a damn. For starters, the timeline view doesn’t flow as it should.

It’s hard to tell if you’re looking at total scores for now or for earlier in the day. Either way, things are way off. So should you buy it? No. It’s bad. And it’s $100 (Rs 5,965). There are some big ideas here, but this device does it poorly. We’d recommend Withings Pulse or Fitbit One instead.