Customer Ratings & Reviews

The Amazon Halo Band can work in conjunction with key Halo health metrics managed by a Halo Membership for items like heart rate, Activity points, Sleep score, and on-demand blood oxygen levels available on the Halo View color touch display. The first full year (12 months) of Halo membership is included in the purchase of the wrist band. The Halo View (there are 2 other models with one being more expensive and the other one being less expensive) can provide a personalized exercise program to help improve your movement related health over time. You can measure the amount and quality of your sleep, and utilize daily meditations and browse recipes from WW, Whole Foods Market, and more. For example, you can get a tailored weekly menu that syncs to your shopping list on Alexa. You can measure your body fat percentage by using your smartphone camera and the Halo app. A novel application of the Halo world allows you to analyze your tone of voice. While working out, including live workouts, out you can call & text notifications, control music, and get move reminders right from the Halo View. It works with app works with Alexa and can give you your health summary, activity scores, the quality of your sleep etc. The app content is constantly growing and should be a boon to traveling the road to Wellville. The entry price is low enough to provide an inexpensive way to start tracking fitness. It is well designed, sturdy and engineered to handle most active environments.

THE GOOD - Affordable initial price - Lightweight - On-wrist notifications for calls and text messages - Lots of fitness and health programs available in application THE BAD - Requires monthly subscription for full use - Long initial setup - No notifications for email, calendar, or anything else - No GPS, either on-board or tethering through phone - Tricky strap fastener - Can't customize band interface or icons - Sluggish mobile application interface - Using app and band is big drain on phone battery - Can't view data or fitness programs from web browser or second device THE TLDR The Halo View is inexpensive because Amazon plans to make it up on the backend with the required subscription. While there are lots of good training programs and meal recipes available, they're jumbled together in a mobile app that's slow, clunky, and poorly organized. It only has phone call and text notifications for your phone with no other smart watch integration functions. Without a subscription, it's a very basic fitness band with few features. THE DETAILS You'd think a company with Amazon's resources and market research would be able to manufacture a near perfect fitness band. But this new Halo View makes them 0 for 2. There's not a lot of good to say about the Halo View, or rather, not a lot of good things that don't also apply to most competing fitness bands available. It's reasonably lightweight and doesn't put a lot of pressure on your wrist. The screen is a nice sharp OLED display that's easily readable in indoors and out. It does a reasonable job tracking heartrate and activity levels. It will vibrate and notify you of incoming calls and text messages on your phone. The Halo doesn't have an onboard GPS, nor can it tether to the GPS in your phone, so runners who want distance tracking should steer clear. The really nice feature here is the amount of health related content available on Amazon's platform. You have access to a LOT of fitness programs, videos with professional trainers guiding you through workouts, food and diet plans with recipes, and a lot more. These are really helpful for someone just starting a health regimen, who doesn't already have a lot of know-how in safe exercise habits and what not. So on this, Amazon gets big props. However getting to this content and filtering through it can be an exercise in frustration. Initial setup was a hassle ( I use Android, so I can't say if iOS is as bad ). Starting the Halo application on your phone or tablet, you have to first log in with an Amazon account then create a profile ( name, age, weight, height, etc ). Then it goes to Bluetooth pairing with the Halo itself and checks for firmware updates. For me, it downloaded an update then rebooted the Halo. This required me to go through the whole setup process again. After initial setup. I enabled phone and text notifications on the Halo. This required allowing Android privileges to the Halo, but the change also required the Halo to be re-paired with my phone. That re-pairing forced me to go through initial profile setup yet AGAIN. The notifications themselves are barely useful. You can accept or reject a call on the Halo, but you can't respond to text messages from it. Text notifications also display a lot of the message header, which doesn't leave a lot of room for it to display the message contents. Notifications for group messages only shows that you received one, but nothing else. You also have to clear notices on the Halo independent of your phone, so if you've marked a text as read on your phone, it won't clear it from the Halo, and vice versa. Also, the Halo only supports notices for calls and text. You can't get notifications for email, phone OS alerts, or any other apps on your phone. For fitness and exercise tracking, the Halo uses an arbitrary point system rather than normal metrics like steps taken or minutes active. An activity or workout is worth different points depending on how high your heartrate stays for a given period of time. It might be simple for some people to think "I'm aiming for X points per day," but I prefer tracking how many active minutes I have in a given day or week. Also, the Halo will subtract points from your tally if it thinks you have too much sedentary time in your daily routine. Do you have a desk job? You'll lose points. Taking a nap or catching up on some healthy sleep on a weekend morning? That's too much down time. Speaking of sleep, the tracking is fairly poor. Unfortunately like so many other fitness trackers, there is no option to manually put the Halo in sleep mode; it's all automatic. The Halo must track gentle resting as light sleep because it thinks I always fall asleep in under five minutes. To make matters worse, it's very easy to accidentally turn the Halo's display on. You can set a custom night time schedule where it won't turn on just from raising your wrist, but if any part of your body touches the screen while you're moving in your sleep and it will turn on. To go along with this, the Halo itself has very few customization options. The watchface has 9 digital clocks that are the same style, just different colors, and 2 analog faces. There is no option for 24-hour time and the week always starts on Monday. The Halo interface and menus can't be customized. You can't rearrange icons or hide options. You can't pin often used utilities like the stopwatch to a home screen. You can't rearrange the different exercise profiles to put your most used modes at the top of the list. There is no auto-brightness option for it to change the display brightness between indoors and outdoors. The default strap fastener can be tricky to close. It's easiest to fasten if you do it on the outside of your wrist. I prefer leaving the display on the inside of my wrist as it protects it better from accidental damage, but the Halo doesn't support any kind of landscape display mode for wearing it like this. After setting up the band itself, finding relevant information in the application is clumsy. The "Feed" tab is essentially a marketing list for Amazon using a "recommended for you" algorithm based on your past use. After a few weeks of use it gets a little better by showing quick links to your active exercise programs, but I find it still mostly useless. Vital stats and basic metrics are under the "Data" tab, but things are split into a lot of different categories. By default, data is grouped by week; trying to view stats for a given day requires drilling down and going through more sub-menus. Having separate sub-categories for "Activity," "Movement," and "Body" also makes it confusing to know what data is found where ( are my workouts tracked in Activity or Movement? ). As said before, the Halo has a wealth of exercise programs and diet recipes, but finding ones you want isn't always easy. You can look for an individual workout and program that includes mixed workout videos with a schedule. You can use filters to only show things from certain categories, but there is no search feature. The filter categories have a lot of overlap ( like Conditioning and Endurance, Build Muscle and Build Strength, or Stability and Posture ). The filters can reduce the list you look through, but without a search feature you have to browse through many lists to find what you want. Simply looking for a daily stretching program took me over 15 minutes. There is a bookmark feature, so you can sort through your favorites easier, but finding them to mark in the first place is the hard part. With the mobile app being slow and clunky, it would be easier and faster to view your data and program progress from a web browser on a regular computer, but there is no way to do so. Despite already having a massive website, Amazon doesn't have any sort of web portal access to the Halo system. Everything you do with the Halo must be done through a mobile application. Not only that, but it can only be done through one mobile device. I wanted to install the Halo app on my tablet in addition to my phone so I could have a larger screen to follow my exercise program videos. When I launched the app on my tablet, it wanted me to go through the entire profile setup process again and pair a Halo band. I couldn't simply sign-in and have the app download my health data. And despite how many people have a FireTV device, there is no Halo Fitness app available there either. Considering the Halo's main benefit is in the training programs and video content, its overall value is tied to the ongoing cost of maintaining that monthly subscription. The Halo comes with a one year membership, but if you plan to use it longer, that's an extra $50ish per year. For a sub-$100 fitness band, that's a significant cost increase. Also, that first year membership is not transferable. If you give your Halo to someone else before the first year is over ( if you decide it isn't right for you ) the remaining membership will not transfer to the new owner. Without the subscription, you don't just lose access to the videos, you also lose access to most of the Halo functions: it will track heartrate, sleep time ( but not sleep stages ), and basic activity levels, but that's it.

I am really unhappy with this purchase.Sometimes it gives me too much information, sometimes none at all. I only got it to measure step count, and am frustrated that it this seems to exceed its capability. I don't recommend this.