Basis Peak Review

Made of very soft silicone - It will fit comfortably onto any wrist. On the underside is a red design that contrasts nicely to the main black. The watch is pretty large and demands quite a bit of wrist real estate. However, the fit is natural and it never seems obtrusive. Flexing your wrist back and forth when weight lifting while wearing the Basis Peak is no problem.

Biometric readers - There is a perspiration and skin temperature reader, as well as a heart rate monitor. It should be noted that, for the heart rate feature to work consistently, you have to wear the watch pretty tightly. Some people consider this uncomfortable. When running you may find that the Basis Peak will periodically lose your heart rate. Chest heart rate monitors are far more accurate. Unfortunately, you are not able to pair the Basis Peak with a chest heart rate monitor.

Gorilla Glass 3 - protects the screen of the device. This does a great job of preventing scratches and dings. However, the glass is recessed rather than raised. This can cause dust and debris to get caught around the edges.

Touch screen - is very responsive, allowing you to swipe through to get your information. The first screen will display the time in huge digits. A single tap will reveal the month, day and battery life remaining. Scrolling to the left reveals your syncing options. When you scroll to the right, you get your heart beats per minute. From this screen, you scroll up to see your total steps and calories burned for the day. Scrolling right will reveal the most recent active session you have engaged in. Your activity options are walking, running, swimming and outdoor cycling. It will provide you with total steps, duration, and calories burned.

On the Basis App dashboard, the 3 most basic pieces of information are revealed; resting heart rate, steps taken and calories burned. The second row of data details your habits. These diamond-shaped patterns have goals for each, with a colored line going around each diamond as you make progress. The app does a good job of attempting to adjust your daily routine through this feature. As you complete certain different habits, the new one are unlocked, with a slight increase in difficulty. This system allows you to progress from baby steps to put in place a complete health and fitness lifestyle pattern.

Basis will not only provide you with move reminders, but it will give you specific activities to perform.

Your recent activity is also shown on the Basis app dashboard. It will give you the most recent information about sleeping and walking. However, the dashboard does not display your entire day’s worth of information. All the other information through the app is obtained by clicking the menu button at the top left of the dashboard. This will give you a deeper breakdown of the information. For example, clicking on habits will give you a weekly timeline of your performance. Basis will not allow you to add any new habits until you have accomplished your existing ones. This may be frustrating for some people.

From the menu you can also choose ‘Activity Feed’. Basis records and shows segments of each recorded activity. It breaks down every segment of your day, and you have to piece it all together. It does not show your entire day at a glance, which would have made it much easier to analyze. However, Chart View will give you more on screen information. Along the top, you get your heart rate, steps, calories burned, skin temperature and perspiration levels. By tapping on this information, you can toggle between maximum and average levels. However, the information is only displayed in three hour increments. This means that you have to scroll back and forth to get an overall picture of what your day was like.

Basis incorporate a feature called Body IQ into their app. This allows the device to automatically detect what type of activity you are performing. Walking, running, outdoor cycling and swimming are all detected automatically. The band will automatically adjust its calculation to make sure that the appropriate level of calories burned are measured for each of these activities. When you begin an activity, the screen on the watch will turn white. This indicates that you are now in the midst of a session, with training information displayed.

​The Basis Peak can stream your heart rate information via Bluetooth to such third party apps as such as RunKeeper. There is no GPS functionality on the Basis Peak. Therefore, you will not get course mapping of your route. There is also no measurement of estimated distance.

The Basis app allows you to make adjustments to the time and day displayed with options of manually syncing your data and updating the firmware. You can also change your personal profile on the settings menu. Under support you can directly email basis about any issues or questions that you may have.

The Basis Peak is a very solid activity/fitness tracker with some solid innovations. The habit tracking feature is a highlight. Grey areas include the requirement to wear the band tightly in order for heart rate monitoring to kick in, and actual analysis of your heart rate. The app does not tell you if your heart rate is at a good level or not. Nor does it explain or interpret your skin temperature. Lack of GPS and distance estimation, along with lack of comparable history for your days, weeks and months of activity are also problematic. The battery life is also not very good.

​The Basis Peak does very well in some areas but lacks some key elements. For such a high price tech band, this is a concern.