Fake Fitness Gadgets Hitting the Market

My Jawbone UP on my desk. It says to wear it 24/7, but I don’t wear it in the shower.

I’ve been wearing the Jawbone UP for about five weeks now. The wearable fitness gadget tracks my steps taken, distance traveled, and my sleep. The best part is the sleep. It’s interesting to know how well I’m sleeping and sometimes, how not-so-well. I’m a competitive person, so I like that the bracelet lets me compete (against myself) to make sure I sleep better every night and take more steps every day. I started wearing the bracelet because of a story we did in the May issue of Boston magazine on the wearable fitness trend. Now, I’m just sort of obsessed with my daily numbers. You plug it into your smartphone and it magically transfers all of the data into an easy-to-read app.

But there are a few problems. First, it’s not sexy. I don’t find it very stylish, and I am sometimes embarrassed to be wearing it. Do people know what it is? Do they think I am on a diet? Second, I wish it tracked heart rate and had a GPS. Third, I’m not losing any weight. In fact, I’ve gained weight during the time I’ve been wearing it. But that could be more about the fact that I moved just steps from a Flour Bakery and have a serious chocolate brownie addiction. So whether or not these wearable fitness gadgets actually work, only time will tell. But due to their growing popularity, it was only a matter of time before there’d be knockoffs. Like the fake handbags and fake Apple stores before it, wearable fitness gadgets now have their own clones. This month, TechCrunch reported on the Codoon, Jawbone UP’s Chinese knockoff. It looks the same, has all the same features, and even Codoon’s website looks the same as Jawbone’s. So what’s the difference? The price. The Codoon costs a third of what the Jawbone UP costs.

You be the judge. Do they look eerily similar to you? Condoon on the left, Jawbone on the right.

Codoon on Facebook. Jawbone UP on my desk. Both use the crescent for sleep mode.