Microsoft Band 2 review: It’s good, but it’s not the one

The original Microsoft Band was not a masterclass in design. Part fitness tracker and part wrist-borne ASBO tag, Microsoft’s first foray into the fitness tracking space was a curious hodgepodge of health-tracking sensors, questionable design and smartwatch-esque features. It was an ambitious, yet flawed addition to the world of fitness trackers. Now, the Microsoft Band 2 is attempting to right those wrongs.

Microsoft Band 2 review: Design

The only familiar thing about the Band 2 is its narrow, rectangular display. Almost everything else has changed, and for the better. Gone is the flat screen and bulbous all-black design of the previous model. The strap is now substantially wider, by a significant 3.5mm, and a larger curved AMOLED display takes centre stage.

Metal edges surround the bright, clear screen and roll around the rear. Even the adjustable clasp is now made from metal. The Band 2 is arguably what the first band should have looked like in the first place.

Wrap it around your wrist, and the biggest improvement is immediately obvious – it’s now quite comfortable to wear. The metal latch provides a good amount of adjustability, and the wider, more pliant strap means that getting a snug fit doesn’t end up cutting off the blood supply to your hand. Personally, I found the original Band was either too loose or too tight – and often unpleasantly uncomfortable – so this is a huge step forward.

One thing that remains is the proprietary charging cable, although Microsoft has tweaked the design. Instead of attaching to the rear of the display as with the original, this now snaps magnetically to the end of the strap, with small plastic prongs helping to hold it in place. The best news, though? The Microsoft Band 2 charges from empty to 80% in half an hour, with the final 20% taking another hour to trickle-charge.

Microsoft Band 2 review: Features

While the original Band had ten sensors, the Band 2 turns it up to eleven, adding a barometer to the mix. This allows the Band to more accurately estimate how much altitude you lose or gain on your runs and rides, or simply measure how many flights of stairs, or “floors”, you’ve climbed throughout the day.  

The full list of the Band 2’s sensors is impressive. It measures your heart rate, skin temperature and galvanic skin response; it has a three-axis accelerometer and gyroscope, GPS, an ambient light sensor and a microphone – the list goes on and on. It’s this team of sensors that fire raw data into the Microsoft Health app on your smartphone and then up to Microsoft’s cloud, where all the juicy data is chewed through and analysed, before being fired back to the Health app on your phone.

The sheer ambition of the Band 2 is difficult to fault. This is a fitness band that wants to be as useful to a gym-frequenting exercise fanatic as someone who just wants to get a clearer idea about how much (or how little) exercise they get on their daily grind.

Strap it to your wrist, and you can forget about it if you want. It’ll still tell you how far you’ve walked, how many calories you’ve used and even attempt to analyse how well you’ve slept. It’ll also estimate how many of the burned calories were fat and how many carbs, in the hope of helping you eat the right stuff. It seems versatility and hands-off ease of use are front and foremost of Microsoft’s vision.

Microsoft Band 2: Interface and notifications

The Band 2’s interface is as simple and elegant as ever. The bright, crisp touchscreen tells the time by default (you can set it to time out and wake it with a button press if you want it to last a little longer between charges), while a stroke to the right gives a quick glimpse of the remaining battery life, Bluetooth connection and whether the heart rate sensor is active.

Tap the screen, and you get a quick overview of your current stats for the day: how many steps you’ve taken, distance covered, the calories you’ve burned, how many flights of stairs you’ve climbed and you can also check your current heart rate.

Swipe left on the homescreen, and you’ll see all the Band 2’s installed apps and various activities spread across a series of icon-studded tiles. What you see can be customised via the Microsoft Health app on your smartphone. This comes in Android, iOS and, naturally, Windows Phone flavours. Not a runner? Fine, simply remove that option from the list. Not a golfer? No problem. If, like me, all you want is a Sleep tile, a Cycling tile and a Starbucks tile for quickly bringing up your Starbucks loyalty barcode, then that’s fine – you can have up to 13 of the things, or as few as you like.

And you can also choose to receive notifications from your smartphone, with emails, texts, Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Twitter updates all on the menu – simply add the relevant tile in the app.

Emails, texts and social network updates come through to their own tab, and a quick tap of the message displays them on the screen, one word at a time – which is vaguely handy if you’re running (and there’s nothing nearby to run into), but not ideal on a bike.

Microsoft Band 2: Cycling, walking and sleeping

I’m not a runner, so my main activities are walking to and from the train station, sleeping, and cycling the hour-long commute in and out of London twice a day. I do longer rides, of around four to five hours, at the weekends, and I normally use a Garmin Edge or Vivoactive smartwatch in tandem with a wireless ANT+ heart rate strap to log and record my efforts.

For me, the original Band was great as an everyday fitness tracker, and here the Band 2 still gets my thumbs up. I love being able to get an idea of how much exercise I’ve done during the day, and the insights into my sleeping patterns and habits, as well as my resting heart rate (a raised resting heart rate is a reliable sign of fatigue or impending illness, as it happens), do genuinely help to provide a clear idea when to work out harder and when to give my body time to recover. It’s all useful, interesting stuff, and the fact that the Band 2 records all of this data without any intervention is a big, big plus.

From the few days I’ve had with the Band 2, the pedometer functions seem pretty accurate, too – they certainly tally with my Garmin Vivoactive, anyway. However, the Band 2’s sleep recording is far better than the Garmin implementation. It was more consistently capable of recognising when I actually went to sleep, and wasn’t so readily fooled by periods of inactivity sitting in front of the TV. Just like the Garmin, it splits sleep into light and “restful” (deep) sleep, as well as marking when I woke up or tossed and turned in the night.

I’m less impressed by the Band 2 as a cycling companion, however. In fact, it suffers from all the same, deal-breaking limitations that put me off the first version. My biggest bugbear is the inaccuracy of the heart-rate monitoring. If you rely on a heart-rate monitor to indicate when you’re pushing yourself just the right amount – hard enough to be able to sustain a maximum level of exertion, but without running out of steam, for instance – then you’ll find the Band 2 to be lacking.

I compared the recorded data from the Band 2 with a section from the same ride recorded on my Garmin Vivoactive. The differences are huge. The Band 2’s heart rate trace (the red line in the graph below) is stair-stepped and coarse, whereas the Garmin outputs a far more believable set of data.

The speed trace (blue) from the Band 2 looks suspect, too, indicating I was constantly speeding up and slowing. This was on a section of road that was relatively clear, when I was cruising along at a steady pace, so there’s something clearly awry. 

Microsoft Band 2: Battery life

Microsoft claims around two days of battery life for the Band 2 – exactly the same as the previous version – but it makes the proviso that “advanced functionality like GPS use will impact battery performance”. This is true: my experience of the original Band was that GPS-tracking and heart rate monitoring absolutely destroy the battery, and the Microsoft Band 2 is no different.

Two hours of commuting on the bike (one hour in the morning, one in the evening) hammered the battery from around 90% to 50%, which left me having to charge the Band 2 at the end of the first day. By comparison, the Garmin Vivoactive uses around 10% of its battery life per hour with a wireless ANT+ heart rate strap attached.

I seized the chance to take the Band 2 out for a chilly (read: absolutely bloody freezing) run with the cycle club, and – just as I suspected – it couldn’t last the course. I left the house with 95% on the dial, and it breathed its last after 3 hours 35 minutes and 58 seconds – precisely 75.5km into a 94km ride. The Garmin Vivoactive on my other wrist lasted the entire ride with battery to spare: it dropped from 58% to 13% over the four and a half hours.

Frankly, I was hoping for more from the Band 2. It’s possible that I might be able to tease out a little more longevity by changing the screen brightness from automatic to low, turning off Bluetooth completely, or even – perish the thought – disabling the heart rate monitoring, but it’s never going to be my go-to device. And I suspect the same goes for any moderately keen cyclists – circa 4 hours of GPS and heart-rate tracking is, to put it kindly, below par. 

Microsoft Band 2: Verdict

Microsoft has made some important improvements with the Band 2. It’s much, much more comfortable – so much so that I’ve been wearing this version all day, every day without noticing it. It does still get caught on shirt sleeves, far more so than the Garmin Vivoactive, but the Band 2 is now comfy enough to strap on and forget.

For me, however, the Band 2 hasn’t addressed some its biggest flaws. Battery life still isn’t long enough for long-distance or all-day cycle rides, and the inaccurate heart-rate data rules it out as a reliable training partner for me. If I can’t rely on the Band 2 to tell me exactly how hard I’m pushing myself, it’s simply no use at all. I’d like to think Microsoft will rectify this with software updates, but given that this flaw hasn’t been fixed on the first Band, I don’t hold out much hope. 

What would I buy right now? Probably the Garmin Vivoactive, and you can read why in my full review. For my needs, there is no perfect device, but now that the Vivoactive is available for around £130 it’s a much more appealing package. 

I suspect, though, that I’m not the target market for the Microsoft Band 2, so that’s why I passed the Band 2 to one of my colleagues, Alan Martin, who’s more of a runner and footballer than long-distance cycling fan. For him, and many others, the Band 2 may still strike a decent balance of features, design, fit and price – and they may not be quite as picky about the data side of things. Head on over to the following page to get a feel for what Alan thought about the Band 2.

Hello. Change of writer.

I’m Alan, and I’m hijacking this review for a second opinion, specifically of the running functionality, having covered what happens when you run a 10k with seven fitness trackers on, other than getting funny looks.

I don’t disagree with what Sasha has said, as a whole. The Microsoft Band 2 has loads going for it: the screen is bright and vibrant, it has loads of functionality and it’s easy to use. The downside is that it’s bulky, heavy and looks a bit like an electronic tag for criminals under house arrest.

I tried playing my regular five-a-side match with it, but was asked to take it off after five minutes by the referee, presumably concerned it could cause an injury. Subtle it isn’t.

Anyway, that’s my summary from using it day-to-day, but all of that is covered in far more detail over the previous three pages, so here’s how I tested it. Map My Fitness and Mapometre both claimed the route was roughly 5km – 5.02km for the former and 4.99km for the latter. My phone, via Runkeeper, robbed me of 0.26km:

So over to the Microsoft Band 2 to settle this disagreement. My legs certainly felt like they’d run 5k, but they have proved to be unreliable witnesses in the past.

Oh. And no, I don’t know why the app is designed to have so much blue space at the top either: only the bottom section scrolls.

Now, some of this discrepancy can be blamed on the GPS in the Microsoft Band 2. Looking at the post-run map, the route only kicked in on Microsoft’s device after around six short streets – a distance that Map My Run calculates as 1.33km, so that doesn’t explain it either. The Microsoft Band 2, of course, has a crazy array of sensors so it’s possible this is its best guess using the data available without the GPS, but if it is, it isn’t a very good one.

I was also wearing a Jawbone UP3 (centre, above) and Fitbit Flex (right, above). Neither of these has GPS, and it kind of shows:

Tracker	Steps	Estimated distance	Actual distance
Runkeeper + handset	–	4.74km	5km
Microsoft Smartband	4,346	4.67km	5km
Jawbone UP3	3,705	4.35km	5km
Fitbit Flex	3,864	3.7km*	5km

*This was a tiny bit of a fudge, because Fitbit only gives the total distance for the day. As Fitbit claimed I’d traveled exactly 5km in the whole day, I took the percentage of steps taken in the running period (77%) and divided the distance equally coming up with my magic number. Better than nothing.

So it’s more accurate than fitness bands half the price, but then you’d hope it would be. One area I will praise the Microsoft Band 2 for is its heart rate monitor. The stats provided from that were significantly more believable than the Jawbone, which actually claimed my heart rate spiked after I stopped running for half an hour last time. By contrast, as you can see above, the Microsoft Band 2 provides numbers that are both plausible and usable.

So I liked the Microsoft Band 2, but I wouldn’t buy one. It’s too bulky and uncomfortable, and although the stats it provides are more in depth than your standard wristbands, on the evidence of the test above, they’re far from perfect.