The UNA Watch is something that I’ve been waiting on for nearly 2 years.  The watch is a modular, end user repairable, hardware upgradable (at least theoretically), wearable that keeps track of your physical activity and workouts.

This is not a smartwatch per se. It’s an activity watch with built-in GPS tracking, heart rate monitoring, and, of course, activity tracking. If you’re a workout junkie or if you’re someone who’s very active, this is going to track your steps, your activities, and give you a real map of where you’ve been and how long you’ve been at it.

Scrolling through its built-in activities, I see a very limited list, which has the following:

• Cycling,
• Hiking,
• Running,
• Treadmill Workout.

That’s it. That’s the complete list of trackable activities. It’s too short. It’s missing some really obvious elements in the list like… Walking. There’s a difference between walking outdoors, walking indoors, and walking on a treadmill.

It’s also missing things like:

• Stair Master
• Eliptical
• Rowing
• Jump Rope
• Mountain Biking
• Trail Running (which is different from a track or roadwork/road run)
• Golfing
• Bowling (though, admittedly, this is a bit specialized and an odd-man-out inclusion)

There’s a LOT that needs to be updated here. I’d really like to see an update come from UNA where they update activities to include a lot more than what they have already built in. UNA can pull from my list of suggested activities or from their own, of course.

The hardware is outstanding, though I would like to see more information about which types of bands can be used with the watch. I’d also love to see different watch faces become available. But that, at least, isn’t a deal breaker…

And while there really isn’t anything that I would call a deal breaker associated with the watch, I can tell you that I’ve had a very difficult time updating it to the latest version of its firmware, from 1.02 to 1.2.0.

The watch is constantly getting updates from my phone in terms of notifications. They interrupt the firmware download from the phone to the watch.  I got a call on my phone while updating the watch.  That caused the update to fail at 92% of the download from the phone to the watch.  Nearly ANYTHING that happens on the phone during the firmware download causes it to time out.

Dude…

If you can’t have notifications interrupt the update to the watch or if you can’t take a phone call during the update to the watch, then you either need to isolate the process so that notifications, calls, etc. don’t cause the bluetooth file download to fail, or you have to block them.  One of the two… this update has really been a frustrating experience.

As of this writing, I am still trying to get the firmware updated, and it’s on its 5th attempt (and after a time out, you have to kill the app on the phone and restart it – allowing it to reconnect and resync everything on the watch – while the watch screen stays locked to 0% Updating (or whatever percentage it failed on) until the process completes.  Hitting the back button on the watch doesn’t return you to the main watch face.)

UNA is a new device, new company and new experience.  Its going to take them a few iterations of hardware, software and firmware to get everything ironed out – if the company can last that long, that is.  The market is very tight and having a new company and venture in a market this competitive and tight (let’s face it… Fitbit, Pixel Watch, Samsung and Apple are going to be tough players to compete against…), is going to be a huge challenge.

Now, let’s hope this firmware update completes without bricking the watch after failing 5+ times.