I got the band yesterday and have been wearing it for a full 24hours now (minus a few minutes from showers). I've worn it both ways (screen on the outside of the wrist and on the inside. It's definitely more comfortable and easier to navigate when the screen is on the inside of your wrist but it's not impossible if you wear it facing outward. The heart rate sensor is on the clasp so I feel like your heart rate is more accurate when the screen is on the outer wrist (which places the sensor near the radial artery) but it still gets your pulse regardless of which orientation.
Navigating is easy enough. The Start Screen/Me tile Shows the time and you can toggle through your HR, distance traveled, date, # of steps taken, and calories burned. swipe from left to right on the me tile to see the battery indicator and whether you have the heart rate monitor and Bluetooth turned on. Swiping from right to left to see notification tiles of which you're allowed 12 or 13. Depending on which tiles you have pinned it can be really useful (weather, workout, phone call) to somewhat annoying (having messenger pinned was just constant buzzing because of a group chat I was in). Also, notifications are only actionable as soon as the arrive. When you first get a text message you have the option to send a preset quick response but if you miss that initial window, you can only view the message and must respond from your phone. And unfortunately viewing messages on Band does not clear the notifications on your phone but hopefully they will fix that in the future.
The fitness features are great. From the app you can choose from 99 different workouts which show you the breakdown of the circuit, and has videos showing each of the exercises if you are not familiar with them. I haven't looked at each in detail but all the workouts seem to be upper body, full body, or running. There is not strength workout solely focused on legs, that I saw, which is a shame considering sooooo many people skip leg day
. Once a workout is picked you can download it to your band and the band will walk you through it. It tells you how many reps you are supposed to do, counts down the rest time, and shows you the next exercise before hand so that you can set up during your rest period and not waste time. When I bought it, the representative told me that the band was able to count reps for you. Perhaps that is coming in a future update, but that is not currently the case. Viewing your post workout summary (on the app) is very helpful. it shows you the total duration of your workout (with the option of a detailed view to see how long it took you to do each exercise/circuit if you chose a predetermined workout), how many calories you burned (how many from fat and from carbs), and heart rate information (peak, avg, low, Ending HR and HR 1min and 2mins after you ended). And i'm not sure how they calculate it but they give an estimated recovery time (I did a 30 min workout this morning and my estimated time for recovery was 3 hours and 56min).
Lastly, the sleep monitor works well. Unfortunately it doesn't keep a log, so if you track a night's sleep and then decide to track a nap or something, you will only be able to view the nap. Hopefully in the future they will keep a log so that as one makes improvements to their health and fitness they can see improvements in their sleep patterns. Sleep section tells you your resting heart rate, how long it took you to go to sleep (measured from when you pressed the button saying im going to sleep), how much of that time was deep restful sleep, and how long you were in light sleep.
Overall for their first foray into fitness Microsoft has done a surprisingly good job. there's still a lot of areas where they can improve the device and the app but it's a really good start. I hope they merge the health app with the msn health&fitness app so that you can track calories consumed and calories burned in one place.
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