Many people looking to buy the best fitness tracker to meet their needs have a lot to consider between functionality and aesthetics. The Jawbone UP24 is one of the best looking fitness trackers on the market. In fact, it hardly looks like a fitness tracker and can blend in perfectly with any wardrobe. Combined with its comprehensive features, it is a great fitness tracker for anyone looking for strong motivation as they try to make stronger efforts towards a healthier lifestyle.

The Jawbone UP24 is one of the best designed fitness trackers on the market today. Its twist design is chic and could easily be mistaken for a gender-neutral bracelet. Not only are there three different sizing options, but the color options are vast and let you choose the band that best reflects your personality or style choice from persimmon, navy blue, pink coral, onyx, red, or lemon lime.

The hypoallergenic band is smooth and cool to the touch, rarely causing sticky sweat buildup. Regular cleaning is required to keep the band from looking grungy, but this is typical of most trackers. The arms of the band bend shut without any sort of clasp or hold, and on occasion, the band fell off when changing clothes. This proved to be a slight annoyance, as the band is meant to be worn -- as the name suggests -- 24 hours a day. An additional concern was Jawbone’s use of nickel for the metal end cap buttons. With a significant percentage of the population having an allergy to nickel, and with so many hypoallergenic metal options, it seems foolish that they would use a metal that can cause skin irritation and hives for its users. In fact, there are entire Jawbone community threads dedicated to how to create buffers against the nickel, such as using clear nail varnish or electrical tape to protect the users’ skin. Although the metal end caps look sleek, they certainly should not have been made out of nickel.

However, if you have no skin sensitivity issues of which to speak, the Jawbone UP24 should fit comfortably and add another layer of style to your personal look.

The Jawbone UP24 has the typical tri-axis accelerometer found in most fitness trackers. It records your steps taken throughout the day, which is to be expected, and syncs this information via Bluetooth to the UP smartphone app. Although Jawbone boasts an impressive 14 day batter life from its 32mAh Lithium-ion polymer battery, we found it lasted closer to 7-8 days with regular use.

Whereas wearing a fitness tracker tends to serve as a nice reminder to get extra steps in throughout your day, the Jawbone UP24 takes it to another level with its impressive Idle Alert. App-side, you can set certain goals such as not sitting for more than 30 minutes. In the event you do sit for that long, the band will vibrate as a kind reminder to move around a bit. Additionally, you can program what Jawbone calls “Today I Will,” a handy feature that lets you set goals such as going to bed at a certain time or taking a certain amount of steps. It provides reminders at the beginning of each day of your goal, and then let you know if you succeeded or not. At the end of each week, Jawbone will send you an email telling you detailed information about your week, the progress you’ve made, and how you’ve succeeded in your goals. These little touches add an entire new level of interaction and motivation compared to most other trackers.

Your Jawbone UP24 can be set to three stages: regular daytime tracking, nighttime sleep tracking, or timed activity tracking. Two green LED lights indicate whether the tracker is in daytime mode or nighttime mode (sun-shaped light and moon-shaped light respectively), and you can trigger from one to the other by pressing and holding the end button. Simply tapping the end cap will flash what mode it is in. By pressing once and then holding, you can trigger the timed activity tracker. This allows you to record your time exercising; when you’ve finished you are able to go into the app to select the activity and difficulty level, and the UP24 will calculate approximately how many calories you burned. While the fitness tracker is water resistant, it is unable to be submerged, so don’t wear this tracker for swimming activities.

The sleep mode on the Jawbone UP24 is perhaps one of the most comprehensive sleep modes on a fitness tracker today. Its sleep phase tracking is incredibly comprehensive, including both light/restless sleep and heavy sleep phases in its metrics. With this information, it allows for smart alarms, which adjust the alarm time for the easiest transition into starting your morning by only waking you during periods of light sleep. So, although you may wake up 10 minutes earlier, you’ll feel more well-rested. This is a sharp edge the Jawbone trackers hold over the Fitbit trackers, which have yet to integrate smart alarms; however, the UP24 does not have the automatic sleep mode that the higher-end Fitbit products have. It would be a tied game if it weren’t for the incredibly thorough amount of data the Jawbone UP24 brings to the table.

The Jawbone UP app is easy to use, despite it bugging out on us occasionally. Unfortunately, the app is the only way to access information about your metrics on the fly; unlike most trackers, it is not possible to check any information from the band itself. Additionally, there is no way to track water intake, and although there is a decent food catalogue from which to enter calories, we found more success with third-party apps such as Lose It and MyFitnessPal. To Jawbone’s credit, they have integrated a neat Food Score feature that calculates how nutritional what you eat is based on three ratios: fiber to sugar, unsaturated fat to unsaturated fat, and protein to fat. This is a nice touch that shows a bit of promising effort on their part.

Despite this, the app is sleek and fairly intuitive with thorough metrics and Smart Coach technology. Smart Coach gives encouraging bits of information. For example, if you set a “Today I Will” to get eight hours of sleep but only manage to get seven, Smart Coach will encourage you to go to bed a bit earlier. Conversely, if you have been doing really well at meeting your steps goals, it will suggest you raise your steps goal.

The sleep tracking metrics are accessible through the app, and they are stunningly impressive to say the least. The Jawbone UP24 reports not only how many hours you slept, but also how many hours were sound sleep, how many hours were light sleep, how long it took you to fall asleep, and how long you were in bed for.

The activity metrics are just as thorough. Through the app you can see not only how many steps you’ve taken, but also the distance and percentage amount of your steps goal you achieved. It also tells you how many calories you burned between resting and active moments, including how often you were active and the longest you were active at one time. Additionally, it will tell you the longest time you were idle. We love this, because while it’s motivating to see how long you were active, it’s a different kind of motivation knowing how long you were inactive and totally idle.

Despite lacking a totally hypoallergenic composition and a way to check metrics through the band itself, the Jawbone UP24 is a stylish tracker with some of the most comprehensive sleep tracking metrics on the market today. It brings to the table new levels of motivation and encouragement that many users will find refreshing. While users who are into more intense training might find it lacking in some areas, it is a great starter tracker for anyone looking to be more active.