Jawbone Up3 review: great battery life and companion app, but not worth $180, adds few additional features over the $100 Up2 fitness band
Jawbone Up3 Review: Smartwatches Send Fitness Bands Running — The Up3 was supposed to take fitness bands to a new level, but Jawbone's high-priced hardware doesn't live up to its promise
Context & Ripple Effects
Jawbone's premium band arrives wounded before reviewers even weigh in: the company had already pushed the UP3 past the holidays with discounts for preorderers, then shipped it four months late and without the promised 10-meter water resistance. The review lands two weeks after Jawbone announced the $199 Up4 and the $100 Up2, completing a three-tier lineup where the middle rung now looks hardest to justify.
The verdict — good battery, good app, but few features over the $100 Up2 — matters because the band category is under pressure from both ends: Fitbit is reaching upmarket toward smartwatch territory, and Jawbone itself just licensed its UP platform to third-party hardware.
First-order effects
- Buyers comparing the lineup face an $80 gap between Up2 and Up3 that this review says buys almost nothing, pushing price-sensitive customers down a tier and feature-seekers up to the NFC-equipped Up4.
- Jawbone's flagship-tier credibility takes a direct hit on top of the missed water-resistance spec from the April shipping report.
Second-order effects
- Huawei's $179 TalkBand B2 joining the UP platform gives dissatisfied Jawbone hardware shoppers a way to keep the app ecosystem while leaving the device behind — the software, not the band, becomes Jawbone's retention tool.
- Fitbit's Blaze review cycle shows the rival pressing into smartwatch-style devices at similar price points, forcing Jawbone to defend relevance above the $150 line rather than within it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, sub-$200 wearables bifurcate: cheap commodity bands at the bottom and app-and-payment platforms at the top, squeezing out mid-priced hardware whose only differentiator is design.
- Platform openness becomes the survival move — Jawbone's decision to let third-party trackers like Huawei's onto UP anticipates a market where the winner owns accounts and data, not devices.
The trend: Fitness bands are being squeezed between commodity low-end trackers and smartwatches, pushing vendors like Jawbone to compete on software platforms rather than mid-tier hardware.