Striiv Fusion Bio 2 Review

The Striiv Fusion Bio2 finished at the bottom of the pack, with the lowest score of 45 out of 100. This model substantially struggled with our two most important metrics: health impact and fitness impact. We feel that the Bio2 still has a little way to go to catch up to the rest of the competition.

Performance Comparison

Fitness Impact

The Bio2 was noticeably lacking in our fitness impact tests, earning a 3 out of 10. While it did well at tracking steps, and seemed the best at not registering our attempts to trick it into recording false steps, but that was about all that it excelled at.

The Bio2 has a much smaller online community than other brands, only showing your friends on a timeline-like graphic to see who is ahead. It is only possible to add friends via name or email, not through Facebook.

This model also does not provide you with challenges to motivate you to be active like other models. The Bio2 limits you to a generic activity throughout the day, compared to tracking different activity profiles. We also found that it seemed prone to underestimating workout times, only recording 11 of the 27 minutes in our high-intensity workout test. The Bio2 also lacks the capabilities to track flights of stairs climbed.

Health Impact

While doing slightly better when it came to health the impact, the Bio2 still earned a meager 4 out of 10. The only thing that it excelled at — vibration waking alarm — was a small component of this metric, and it did rather poorly in every other aspect of this category.

While the Bio2 (and every other tracker) did an excellent job at tracking resting heart rate, it did abysmally in our tests for tracking heart rate while completing a workout, averaging an unacceptable 54 bpm off of the chest strap heart rate monitor. This model does not track calorie intake, requiring the use of a third party app (MyFitnessPal).

The final thing we looked at was sleep tracking. The Bio2 received the lowest score in our test, requiring 3 attempts to figure out how to do it correctly and get data that seemed somewhat reasonable. It requires you to automatically initiate sleep tracking, and the data wasn't very clear

Ease of Use

Continuing a trend of mediocrity, the Bio2 scored a 5 out of 10 in ease of use. We liked that it utilized a standard micro USB cable to charge, needing about 2 hours to fully charge the battery. This tracker also synched data to the app very quickly compared to the other model. The app seemed like it was a little outdated, but it was clear to navigate through it. We didn't particularly like that the majority of data was displayed through relative bar charts, without a specific numerical amount associated with it. This tracker was easy enough to put on, and rated to IPX4 for splashes.

Ergonomics

Redeeming itself, the Striiv scored well in ergonomics, earning a 7 out of 10. We found it to be very comfortable to wear. The profile is low and close to the wrist, only getting very lightly stuck when putting on a jacket.

Averaging out the opinions of our test panel, the general consensus was the Bio2 had decent aesthetics, though it wasn't the best.

Display

In our final metric, the Bio2 did average, earning a 5 out of 10. It has a nice display, easily displaying the date and time, as well as steps, distance traveled, calories burned through activity, and time spent being active.

While this device purportedly can receive text, call, and app notifications, we were not able to make that feature work reliably in our testing. The screen was very hard to read in bright light, but did well in lower light conditions. It also seemed a little laggy getting the screen to turn on, requiring you to press decently hard.

Value

While being one of the more inexpensive fitness trackers, it offered a bleak performance in our tests. We did not see this product as worth the money.

Conclusion