I was in my parents’ local the other week having a pint with my mum when the barmaid came over. “You’ll know” she said to me “I’m after one of those wristbands that tell you how active you are. Which one’s the best?” I’ve only used one of these – the Nike Fuelband – and it wasn’t a long lived relationship. I passed it on to someone else who then put it in a drawer where it probably still gathers dust. The problem with the Fuelband was that it gave you an arbitrary number of ‘points’ that indicated how active you’d been that day. They didn’t really mean anything.

So when Microsoft asked me to try out their new Microsoft Band, I felt it would be only right by the barmaid at the Palmerton Arms for me to give it a go. In the interest of vigorous testing, I wore it for a full 24 hours and this is what happened.

7.30am

I wore the band to sleep in so when I woke up I had a look to see what it had to tell me. The sleep tracker said I’d had 7 hours 4 minutes of actual sleep and gave me a 90% efficiency score. Instead of using movement to track your sleep, the band monitors your heart rate, so you have to keep it on. It told me I woke up 10 times, mainly once it started to get light, and it showed me where my light and deep sleep was on a graph on the phone app you need to access additional information. Interesting stuff.

8.20 am

I took it off to have a shower and then, before I got on my bike I put it back on and pressed the bike symbol. The band has GPS and it didn’t take very long to get a fix on the satellites before I started cycling to work. The band pairs with your phone via Bluetooth but can work independently of it too – so you don’t have to keep your phone on you for GPS tracking. Once I’d finished, the cycle commute it gave me the usual stats you’d expect from a GPS: distance, time, average speed, max speed as well as heart rate on the band itself. Checking the phone app gave me a map and terrain info as well as a recovery time. It recommended I wait 8 hours 45 mins until I do this sort of exercise again, but I had no intention of staying late at work. Nice try!

9.00 am

The watch knows what I’m doing as well as what I should be doing. It buzzed as I got to my desk with a couple of calendar reminders of jobs I needed to do. Unfortunately it can’t make me a cup of tea while I get on with them. I haven’t synced it with my email, mainly because I get a lot of emails every day from the six different accounts on my phone. I did however get a couple of text messages – really important ones that I couldn’t have waited to read!

1pm

The thick smog over London meant I skipped my lunchtime run for a yoga class instead. As well as set workouts (more on those) there’s a general workout button that you can press to record any activity you do that isn’t running or cycling. It drew a nice little graph of my heart rate which showed just how relaxed I got in savasana.

The band has a lot of set workouts you can do – some are designed for doing at the gym and other are bodyweight routines you could do at home or at the end of your run. I had a look at the running workouts and I was a not impressed with them. The ‘Beginners Couch to 5k in 14 days’ workout concerns me. I teach beginners to run and we build up to 5k gradually over 10 weeks. My runners would struggle to run 5k after just two weeks and it wouldn’t be responsible for me to ask them to.

What also put me off was the pictures used for the interval workouts. ‘Walk and ‘Jog’ are accompanied by a picture of a woman while ‘Run’ and ‘Sprint’ intervals are indicated by a man. I don’t believe in coincidences where imagery like this is concerned.

5pm

I cranked up the band again to cycle home and track my ride. You’ll be able to hook the band up to various different third party sites/apps like Runkeeper. As yet, it’s not compatible with Strava but Microsoft said they’re looking to expand the number of partnerships they currently have.

7pm

As I walked to a local restaurant the band buzzed on my wrist to tell me that I’d reached my daily step goal. I was a bit dismissive of this in an egotistical “I run marathons, I count my miles, not my steps” way, but as we’re all being told that sitting at a desk is slowly killing us I guess it’s good not to rest on our laurels with the day to day movement stuff.

10pm

I put it back on again ready to track my sleep again and try to smash the previous night’s 90% efficient sleep PB.

In summary

There’s a lot of plus points to this watch. As a GPS watch with heart rate monitor it does a good job and is a really competitive price at £169. The added extra of getting texts and emails on your wrist is a nice novelty – whether it’s useful long-term I’ll have to wait and see. I won’t be using any of the pre-programmed workouts to follow and can’t recommend the running workouts. Let it record what you do but don’t let it tell you what to do.

Microsoft Band launches 15 April and will be available to purchase at Amazon, Currys PC World, Dixons Travel, Harrods, the Microsoft Store and O2. Microsoft gave me the band to test for free.