A bracelet that tracks all activity, counts calorie burn, and looks sporty? Sign me up! From one of the most celebrated sports attire brands, the Nike+ FuelBand ($149 direct) piqued both my interest and my expectations when it was released earlier this year. I, too, bought into the hype surrounding this particular fitness gadget, a simple black rubberized bracelet with a retro-chic LED dot matrix display. Snap it on, wear it all day, and see all your activities, whether you're running, dancing, or rock climbing, transformed into data.

After a few weeks with the Nike+ FuelBand, I still love its looks, but have grown weary of its limitations as a fitness device. The FuelBand doesn't track anything more than motion with an accelerometer, making it little more than a fancy pedometer with a clock—and the swoosh logo. The Web account, where you access your data, doesn't include any advanced metrics or much customization ability. You can't input sleep data (very important to health and fitness) or calories consumed, much less track fluctuations in your weight. You can't even enter what types of activities you've done. Only motion counts, and sure, it counts differently depending on its intensity, but the lack of information leaves the Nike+ FuelBand paling in comparison to the less expensive but data-rich Fitbit Ultra ($99.95, 4 stars), our Editors' Choice fitness gadget, or even the pricier, GPS-enabled, MP3-playing Motorola MotoActv ($249.99 for 8GB, 3.5 stars).

Design

Despite my lack of enthusiasm over what the Nike+ FuelBand can and can't do, I still like its design. The simple, matte black, rubberized bracelet doesn't look like much at all, which I appreciate in a fitness gadget, especially after a few days wearing the unsightly BodyMedia Fit Core ($179.99 plus $6.95 per month, 3 stars). The Nike+ FuelBand, however, blends right in with casual attire.

The bracelet comes in small, medium, and large sizes (see Nike's website for how to measure), and each bracelet includes additional snap-in pieces to make it smaller or larger. A silver snap with the Nike logo that fastens the band doubles as a USB connection point for charging the battery and uploading data.

One tactfully designed button which is flush with the rest of the band, isn't even visible at a distance. Pressing the button lights up the LED dot matrix display, where you'll find the current day's data: "fuel," calories, steps, and time (you can turn off the latter two if you don't want to see them). "Fuel" is Nike's proprietary measurement of activity, which doesn't really tell you anything useful. Steps and calorie burn could be helpful if you had other baselines to judge them against, the way Fitbit Ultra  does. Fitbit tells you the U.S. national average number of steps per day, as well as the daily recommended amount, and also helps you figure out calories by helping you see the calories you consume as well as burn. Fitbit also adds to its accelerometer readings data from a built-in altimeter to more accurately adjust your calorie burn when you climb stairs and hills.

Setup

Out of the box—and by the way, it's a damn good looking box, one of the best I've seen from a company that's not Apple—the Nike+ FuelBand needs to charge and update its firmware. Plug it into a USB port on your computer, and follow the prompts. A small downloader will install, too.

When connected, the battery level displays on the front of the bracelet. While the band charges, you can set up an account at nikeplus.com, where you'll access your data, including weekly and monthly charts of your activity.

During setup, Nike+ needs to know your height, weight, sex, and whether you'll wear the band on your left or right wrist. It also needs to know your daily goal in Nike fuel, which is an entirely vague measurement at this point in your experience with the band. Most other fitness gadgets ask you for a more normalized number, like a target weight or calorie consumption (do you want to eat more or fewer calories than you burn?). If you don't want to think about calories and weight, and only want to focus on how active you are, Nike+ FuelBand will actually serve that purpose rather well. But most people, I suspect, want more meaningful numbers.

Features

According to Nike, the FuelBand has a "sports-tested accelerometer," which is little more than a very smart pedometer. As you move throughout the day, the band keeps count. When you press the button on the bracelet to cycle through the data, the band displays a little row of colored lights below the info. The lights start out red—just one or two at first. The more you move, the more lights are added, inching along and turning orange, then yellow, then green. When you hit your "fuel" goal, the full row of lights illuminate, red to green, and "GOAL" appears above. It's helpful in terms of checking in on your progress, and similar to the Fitbit Ultra's "flower" display, which grows the more active you are.

For an even better sense of your burn, you'll want to sync the band via Bluetooth to the free Nike+ Fuel app, so hopefully you have an iPhone. There aren't apps for any other platform yet. Syncing worked smoothly when I tested it, it only syncs the current day. If you haven't uploaded information from the band via the USB port in a few days, it won't appear on your app until you do.

The battery holds a charge for three days easily. However, the only time you can check the battery level is when it's connected to your computer and charging. So there's no way to tell if it's halfway or low. I never ran the battery low enough to find out if you see a warning.

Conclusions

Because the Nike+ FuelBand doesn't track nearly as much data as the Fitbit Ultra, and costs $50 more, it's difficult to recommend. I do like that the FuelBand is a funky and sporty bracelet (the Fitbit Ultra is a clip-on), but it just doesn't measure up in terms of what you can do with it. Without a food-logging system, calorie counting becomes fairly useless, and because you can't tell the Nike+ website which activities you've done during the day and at what times (as you can with Fitbit), people who actually play sports won't be pleased.

If you want to pay $150 for a bracelet with a swoosh that gives you some idea of whether you're more or less active day-to-day, the Nike+ FuelBand gets the job done, stylishly. But if you're serious about finding an inexpensive fitness tracking device, you'll be much happier with all that Fitbit Ultra offers.

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