Can a fitness band really track your calorie intake?
GoBe's main crime? It doesn't deliver on its most exciting feature. We sorely wanted GoBe to work. We wanted it to blow our socks off, and allow Healbe to silence its critics, dismissing them as overcautious naysayers. Sadly, when it comes to counting calories, we have no reason to believe that's the case. In its defense, Healbe does claim it will continue working to improve the software, but right now, it doesn't provide useful enough data. The second problem is that it's still a device you need to interact with, despite claims to the contrary. You can't just let it do its thing; you need to constantly tell it if you are about to eat, or remember so you can confirm via the app later. Suddenly, the gap between manually logging your food and using the GoBe doesn't seem as vast. On a more positive front, those harshest critics who thought this product was just a scam should have cause to be less quick to judge. It may not deliver on the calorie-counting feature, but Healbe did deliver a product. It's clearly spent time, money and effort to design something that tries to do what it claims. By all the other standards, it's not a half-bad activity tracker. If it somehow bridged the auto-calorie part with some manual food-entry options/shortcuts, it might even be able to claw back some merit as a great holistic proposition. At least in the future. But right now, it's not. There are too many other rough edges for it to deal with. Poor battery life, limited software options and a bulky design could be forgiven if it excelled at something. In combination, however, those flaws conspire to disappoint. Backers who receive theirs won't have a useless device, but it's not the panacea they'd bought into.