The Amazon Halo View is a great option for those on a budget. It’s affordable, and the camera quality is good for the price. However, some people may find it a little creepy because of its design. ..
The Band: Simple Interface, Decent Battery Life
Fitting the Halo View’s band was easy enough, and the strap is light enough that I generally didn’t notice it was there. It has a bright touchscreen that, when set to maximum brightness, is easy to see in the sun. A single oval button below the screen exists for you to wake the screen, or, when the screen is on, to use as a back button. The menu itself is easy enough to navigate, and text messages show up as well as can be expected on a screen this narrow.
If you like the idea of customizing your watchface, though, prepare to be underwhelmed. You have eleven choices, and only a few look very different from the others. Personally, I don’t mind this, as I’m pretty utilitarian about my tech. As long as they aren’t completely ugly, I’m usually fine with defaults.
The View can track your heart rate, steps, calories burned, sedentary time, calculate a nightly sleep score (after syncing with the app), and generate a weekly “activity score.” It figures that based on your steps and exercise sessions, minus some points for sedentary time. It was one of my goals with this band to learn whether or not my activity levels were good enough against the amount of sitting I do at work, and that score helped me achieve that goal.
It can also check your blood oxygen level, though not passively—you have to run a test and stand completely still for the duration. For this and other features, I didn’t have the equipment to test for accuracy, but generally, the data seemed to jive with what I was feeling.
The App: Basic, but Useful Features
The sleep data in the app was interesting to check out, at least at first. In practice, though, my sleep score wasn’t that useful to me. I know my sleep was good last night—I was there. If you need to cultivate better sleep habits, it can function as a motivator for that, but not much else.
The app feature I probably most appreciated though is called “Movement.” You set it up by filming yourself doing several stretches that a video guides you through. The app assesses your mobility and then uses that information to recommend several sets of workouts to do a few times a week. Later, you can take the assessment again to track your progress.
Specifically, I liked how easy Movement made it to start improving my fitness. I was almost immediately watching videos, scoring activity points, and, yes, feeling the burn. My one complaint is that during the assessment I had to stand pretty far from my smartphone, 7 to 10 feet, to allow the camera full view of my person. Depending on your screen size and how up-to-date your lens prescription is, watching the video you’re supposed to be following can be a challenge.
One major problem I ran into with the app happened soon after the initial setup. After toying with it for a few hours, I happened to reboot my smartphone. After that doing that, the Halo app had forgotten my data and needed to pair with the View a second time, which wasn’t possible until I factory reset the View. I enabled cloud syncing in the app settings, hoping that would lessen the chance of that happening again. It didn’t happen again, but it was an annoying and confusing hiccup nonetheless.
… And Then Some Creepy Extra Features
The second feature, Tone, analyzes your voice during conversations. You could describe it sort of like a mood ring, informing you “how you sound to other people.” It does this in real-time during individual sessions, placing you moment-by-moment on a square graph with each corner representing a different category of emotion: excited, happy, sad, and angry. After each session, the app grades your overall “energy” and “positivity” levels.
You’re meant to connect these emotions with other aspects of your health, like how you treat others after getting a bad night’s sleep, or how your vibe improves after you’ve exercised. Interestingly, the app also encourages you to use Tone when practicing any speeches you plan to give so that you have real-time feedback on your performance.
But let’s ignore the privacy concerns for a minute. Let’s also ignore how awkward it is to get consent from people to let your fitness app listen in on your conversations. Even then, it’s still a fact people act differently when there’s a microphone on. That means any conversation you have using Tone is bound to be, in some way, off-kilter. That makes it questionable how accurate the app’s assessments can even be.
To be clear, Body and Tone are completely optional features and not even offered in the initial setup. You must enable and set them up first, and Tone only operates in limited sessions that start and stop when you choose. In other words, it’s not an ambient feature constantly listening in the background.
Should You Buy the Halo View?
For context, our pick for the best fitness band out there, the Fitbit Charge 5, offers better hardware and many more features, but at a higher price and subscription cost. So, if you choose the Halo View, you get what you pay for, and nothing more—other than some extras you probably don’t want to use.
