The Fitbit Surge tracks steps, calories, sleep, workout sessions, and can even monitor your heart rate. Unfortunately, step count accuracy still appears to be Fitbit’s Achilles Heel

The Surge is Fitbit’s high end fitness tracker for 2015 and features a touch sensitive screen, built-in heart rate sensor, and traditional watch style clasp. It’s the most feature packed fitness band Fitbit has ever shipped. But is it enough to put Fitbit ahead of the rest?

The good

• Touch screen is responsive and offers a lot of options without having to reach for your iPhone
• Workout sessions are easy to use and take only a few seconds to initiate
• Heart rate sensor is accurate and collects meaningful data inside the Fitbit app
• Traditional watch style clasp that’s less likely to get snagged on something
• Sleep tracking is automatic, you don’t have to remember to do anything
• Call and text notifications right on your wrist

The bad

• Step count on the Surge is not accurate, like its predecessors
• Calorie counts also suffer from some inaccuracies
• The Surge is a large device which will make it uncomfortable to sleep in for some
• Battery life doesn’t live up to what Fitbit advertises — I only average 3 to 4 days between charges

Setting up the Fitbit Surge is easy enough and doesn’t require anything but the band and your iPhone. After you’ve created a Fitbit account, the Fitbit app will pair with your band. The app is also how you’ll download and install updates to your band’s firmware — you’ll be notified if and when an update is available.

The Fitbit Surge is an exceptionally large fitness band. The face of the Surge felt like an okay size but the band is a lot thicker than it needs to be. You have to make sure you wear the Surge at least a finger width above your wrist bone for the heart rate sensor to work properly. For me this made the thickness of the band even more noticeable.

I didn’t have an issue wearing the Fitbit Surge while performing every day activities like walking, doing chores around the house, running errands, or going to the gym. There were only two instances in which the band got in my way, while sleeping and while typing on the computer. Sleeping may not be an issue for some but if you have small wrists, which I do, the band gets in the way. Whether or not you’re okay sleeping in the Surge will depend on how you sleep. For me, it always seemed to get in the way. I do however like the fact that the Surge tracks my sleep without me having to push a button or tell it I’m going to sleep. It just pays attention to my movements and my heart rate.

Typing was also a pain point for me. I don’t think it would have been if the band was slightly thinner. I didn’t have as much of an issue on my iMac where the edge of the keyboard is shorter. On my MacBook, I always found the Surge digging into my wrist or scratching on the palm rest.

Turning to the face of the Surge, you’ve got a lot of options available to you. The main screen functions just like a regular wrist watch. Tap the button on the left and you can swipe your way to workout sessions and useful data such as your step count, calorie count, heart rate, and more. If you receive a call or a text message, you will see a notification and feel a vibration on your wrist. You can quickly cycle through all your notifications using the side buttons. The Surge is easy to use and the button layout only took me a few minutes to get used to. You can also control music with your Fitbit Surge by pairing it in classic Bluetooth mode in Settings.

At the gym you can quickly start workout sessions and choose what kind of activity you’re performing. You can then view even more detailed statistics inside the Fitbit app. Unfortunately step count on the Fitbit Surge suffers from the same inaccuracies previous versions of Fitbit products have. I wore the Fitbit Surge for a week alongside the UP24, which I’ve found to be the most accurate step count wise, and the differences were obvious. Most days the Surge claimed I took about 500 to 1,000 more steps than the UP24 registered. That obviously trickles down and effects other data such as calorie count. For anyone relying on accurate calorie and step count for weight loss or gain purposes, that’s no good.

On a positive note, the heart rate monitor in the Fitbit Surge is pretty much spot on. I tested it on several different workout machines and it was always within 5 beats per minute. However, you’ll need to make sure that you’re wearing the Surge far enough above your wrist bone. If you don’t, it’ll result in inaccurate beats per minute.

The Fitbit app itself has added some nice improvements over the past year. Most of these improvements are focused around providing more meaningful data and statistics. Fitbit can also read and write to HealthKit if you choose to let it. For anyone that wants to track their heart rate for health purposes, Fitbit can give you averages as well as detailed graphs of how your heart rate changed throughout each day. The same data is available for step count and workouts as well.

The bottom line

I was really hoping Fitbit would have addressed step count inaccuracies this time around. Unfortunately, that’s obviously something they’re still struggling with. The Fitbit app has a lot of potential and provides a lot of great data points. However, that’s only useful if the hardware it depends on actually filters in accurate data.

That being said, I just can’t recommend the Fitbit Surge over other readily available options such as the Garmin vivosmart or Jawbone UP24 that are not only much cheaper, but far more accurate.

• $249 – Buy Now

• Garmin vivosmart fitness tracker review

• Polar Loop fitness tracker review
• UP24 by Jawbone review

Apple is currently dealing with an extended outage for many of its online services, including its iOS App Store and its Mac App Store.

Reports from iMore readers, as well as other outlets, have confirmed the issues. Basically, users can log into the app stores but cannot download any applications. In addition, other reports from outlets like The Next Web state that services like Tunes Connect and TestFlight are not working. This situation has been going on for the past few hours.

Update: Apple’s online service status page now shows that the outage has been going on since a little before 5 a.m. EDT. The outage affected not only the iTunes Store, but iCloud account and sign in, as well as iCloud Mail. However, the iCloud-related outages appear to have been resolved. Apple notes that the iTunes Store outage is impacting all users.

We will update this post when these services are back up and running.

Source: The Next Web; Thanks to everyone who tipped us!

Nokia’s HERE Maps have returned to the iPhone. The mapping app, which includes offline support, was previously available on the App Store, but was pulled following the release of iOS 7.

While the previous version of HERE Maps for iOS was built around HTML5, the new release is a completely native app, designed for iOS 7 and iOS 8. The new app also features an offline mode, allowing you to save maps to your device, according to the official HERE 360 blog:

You can save maps to your phone so that the whole HERE app can be put into ‘offline mode’ and it won’t use any data. Even if your iPhone is in flight mode, you can still see where you are, search for places and navigate there on foot, by public transport or by car.

Offline car navigation features full turn-by-turn audio support, including spoken street names, for both driving and walking. HERE Maps also lets you save destinations ahead of times with Collections, and you can create and view your collections on iOS, Android, Windows, and the web.

HERE Maps is rolling out on the App Store right now, though you may have trouble downloading the app due to the extended iTunes Store outage.

• Free – Download Now

Source: HERE

The Apple Watch isn’t an iPhone any more than an iPhone is a Mac — it’s something new.

It took me a few minutes to get used to using the Apple Watch. At first I came at it as though it were an iPhone that Apple had shrunk down so it could fit on my wrist. Since, intellectually, I knew what pressing the digital crown and the hardware button would do, what tapping icons and the software buttons would do, that’s what I did. Then an Apple representative sent me a tap message. I saw it. I felt it. And I stopped.

Demo areas aren’t real life. The product you’re experiencing isn’t yours. It isn’t connected to your accounts, it doesn’t have your data, and it isn’t set up to your personal tastes. You’re also surrounded by people and noise, you have limited time, and you want to try out as many features as you can. It’s tough to keep the context in mind, to set your expectations accordingly, and to try and extrapolate a product’s demo to its real-life usage. It’s what leads to day-of reaction stories that are sometimes very different to week-in review pieces to months-in review pieces.

The Apple Watch, so interconnected as it is with the iPhone, made this especially true. It made it so tempting to just hunt and peck around, to try to get at everything. Then, as I said, it very literally tapped me out of it.

The digital crown and the button aren’t directly analogous to the Home and Sleep/Wake buttons on the iPhone. Force Touch has no analogue on the iPhone (at least not yet). Trying to use the Apple Watch like an iPhone works about as well as trying to use an iPhone like Mac. (Or trying to use the original iPhone like an old-school BlackBerry or Treo.)

Yes, you can go and seek out all the features if you really want to. Apple made it possible. But the watch really wants to bring those features to you.

Think of it like the difference between iOS 7 and iOS 8. In iOS 7, if you wanted to edit and post a photo to a new social network, you had to take the photo, switch to an editing app, open the photo, make your changes, save it again, maybe repeat the process in another editing app or two, then go to a sharing app, open the photo, and post it. In iOS 8, you just have to take the photo, apply the photo extensions, tap the share extension, and you’re done. Likewise, you can answer iMessages in a banner notification and pull down a calculator widget no matter where you are.

You can still do things the old way if you really want to, you can still hunt down features, but iOS 8 fundamentally changed the way things work — it decoupled interface and switched the interactivity model from pull to push. It made you stop having to go track down features and started bringing those features to you.

The Apple Watch does the same thing, only more so. You’re not really going to access messages by pushing the digital crown, spinning it around the carousel, tapping the icon, and then typing something out. You’re going to get a short look, decide if it needs your immediate attention, and if it does, reply right from the notification. You’re going to raise your wrist, say “Hey Siri”, and send a message right from there.

Notifications and, to some extent Siri, not icons, are going to be the primary portal to apps and activities.

If deeper, longer-form interaction is needed, you’ll absolutely still be able to do it. You’ll be able to tap and spin and swipe and otherwise move through glances and apps and do almost anything you want to do. You’ll even be able to use handoff to continue an especially deep or time-consuming activity on your iPhone, the same way you can handoff from your iPhone to your Mac today.

That’s the advantage of Apple staging convenience and complexity. You can do more with an iPhone than ever before, but you still can’t do everything you can do on Mac, and some things you certainly can’t do as efficiently. You can do a lot of very important things, however, and do them even more conveniently. And that means you don’t have to go running back to your Mac as much as once did.

With the Apple Watch you’ll also be able to do a lot, but not everything you can do with the iPhone. You’ll be able to do some very important things, however, and even some unique things, even more conveniently. And that’ll mean you won’t have to go reaching for your iPhone as much as you do now.

That one little tap on my wrist in the demo area reminded me of all that, and reoriented me as well. The experience I was having wasn’t “first run” it was “first play”. It was what most people will do when they strap on their Apple Watch for the first time — you’ll play with everything, all at once, as much as is humanly possible.

Then you’ll stop playing with it and just start wearing it. You’ll stop working for it and it’ll simply start working for you. And it’ll be yours, connected to your accounts, set up to your tastes.

The Apple Watch isn’t an iPhone any more than the iPhone is a Mac. Computing has moved from the server room to the desktop to the laptop to the pocket and now onto the wrist. Every time that’s happened, every time it’s moved to a new, more personal place, those of us who were used to it in its old place have become slightly anxious, we’ve become subject to our own expectational debt.

Yet every time, over time, we’ve come to not only accept them, we’ve come to depend on them.

I have no doubt, for me, the same will be true of the Apple Watch.

The Chase Support Twitter account is now telling customers that its Windows Phone app, which was removed from the Windows Phone Store in January, will continue to work for anyone who still uses it “until further notice.”

Microsoft is getting into the prediction business once again. It is teaming up with the NCAA to help create a March Madness bracket tool, powered by Bing, that will be launched just in time for the NCAA college basketball tournament.

This is my first review for Windows Central, and frankly it’s a tough one. Evolve has been the subject of much controversy. Many gaming outlets have run articles examining DLC and ‘value for money’ as a result of the game’s business model. Evolve features a prolific amount of paid DLC out of the box, in addition to being a full priced title. For a game that focussed almost exclusively on 4v1 multiplayer, many gamers felt that Evolve may not live up to the asking price. This review carries the danger of becoming yet another article on the issue of value in gaming. Ultimately – I want to help you decide whether Evolve is the kind of game you’d consider worth your cash.

It is no secret that the folks at Cyanogen want to build a stand alone Android replacement, and here they go putting the pieces together.

Creating an Android replacement without accessing Google Services is something that not many are sure can happen, but that isn’t stopping the Cyanogen team from trying. We have already seen Qualcomm partner with Cyanogen and Microsoft apparently invest in them but it was still a mystery as to how they planned to replace the built in Google Services that many of us rely on heavily.

Bank of America has followed through with the removal of their app from the Windows Phone and Windows Stores. In addition, the app itself no longer functions, which is a departure from the route Chase Bank is taking.

Bank of America announced at the end of January that they were discontinuing support for their Windows and Windows Phone apps due to low market penetration. As an alternative, the company has told customers that they can use the online web version on their mobile site.