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The Mobile Gadgeteer

Matthew Miller & Joel Evans

Jawbone CEO offers no questions asked refund to UP owners

By | December 8, 2011, 2:39pm PST

Summary: The Jawbone UP band launched in November as a device to help you improve your health and for many of us it has worked well. However, there were also a large number of people with issues and Jawbone is taking bold steps to correct the problem.

I purchased a Jawbone UP band on launch day and have been using it successfully for nearly a month. Joel also seems to enjoy his UP, but the Jawbone forums are loaded with people experiencing various issues with battery charging and syncing so the CEO of Jawbone just sent the below email to all of us who own an UP band. Let me be clear that the only issue I had was a cap fell off and they sent me two replacements, but I have not had a single battery or sync issue so I am keeping mine.

To the UP Community:

Earlier this year, we unveiled Jawbone’s vision to help people live a healthier life with UP. We’ve been thrilled by the passionate response to this product. We heard from tens of thousands of you through emails, tweets, blog posts and on our forums about how you’re changing your lifestyle and becoming consumers of your own health. In just four weeks, UP users have collectively taken over three billion steps, gotten more than 300 years of sleep and captured hundreds of thousands of meals.

While many of you continue to enjoy the UP experience, we know that some of you have experienced issues with your UP band. Given our commitment to delivering the highest quality products, this is unacceptable and you have our deepest apologies. We’ve been working around the clock to identify the root causes and we’d like to thank everyone who has provided us with information and returned their bands to us for troubleshooting. With your help, we’ve found an issue with two specific capacitors in the power system that affects the ability to hold a charge in some of our bands. We’re also fixing an issue with syncing related to the band hardware. Typically, these issues surface within the first seven to ten days of use. The glitches are purely performance related and do not pose any safety risk.

We’ve also received helpful feedback on the application experience, including bug reports, ways to make signup and finding friends easier, user interface suggestions and new feature requests. Your comments are invaluable as we continue to improve, so please keep them coming and check back frequently for updates to ensure you’re always enjoying the latest features and enhancements.

We recognize that this product has not yet lived up to everyone’s expectations - including our own - so we’re taking action:

The UP No Questions Asked Guarantee

This means that for whatever reason, or no reason at all, you can receive a full refund for UP. This is true even if you decide to keep your UP band. We are so committed to this product that we’re offering you the option of using it for free.

The program starts December 9th and full details can be found at http://jawbone.com/uprefund.

For most of you, this program is simply meant to offer peace of mind. Please continue to enjoy your UP band and keep sharing your experience with us. If you encounter any problems with your UP band, contact Jawbone directly for your choice of a replacement and/or refund under this program. It’s that simple.

Jawbone remains deeply committed to addressing all issues with UP, investing in the category and giving our customers the tools to live a healthier life. We’ve temporarily paused production of UP bands and will begin taking new orders once these issues have been sorted out. In the meantime, we’ll continue to release app updates for existing users.

We regret any disappointment we’ve created for our community of users and appreciate the trust you’ve put in us. The fact that you’ve taken the time to talk with us and help us make a better product is simply phenomenal. Our customers have always been part of our team and we’re incredibly grateful for that.

Please know that we’re doing - and will continue to do - everything we can to make things right. This is just the beginning for UP and we are excited to keep improving until we realize the powerful vision of what this category can be.

If there is absolutely anything else we can do for you, please let us know.

Hosain Rahman
CEO
Jawbone

One of the reasons I purchased the UP was because I have always found Jawbone’s products, like the Jambox speaker and Icon headset to be superior products that were updated with fixes and new features over time.

I enjoy the movement tracker and sleep tracking functions in my UP band and as I said I have not had any problems so I am keeping mine. I don’t use the food tracking function and am hopeful we will see software improvements to make this part more useful to me as well. It is nice to know if I do eventually have any issues that Jawbone will do what it takes to make things right. You don’t often see a company take such bold steps to stand behind their products and think first of the consumer so it is refreshing to see this, especially during the holiday season.

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Topics

Matthew Miller is an avid mobile device enthusiast who works during the day as a professional naval architect in Seattle.

Disclosure

Matthew Miller

Matthew is a professional naval architect by day and a mobile gadget freak at all other times. He purchases most of his devices and then sells them on eBay or Craigslist to buy more. Many other devices are sent for review on a 30-day loaner basis and then returned to the carrier or manufacturer. If any are provided as “keeper” or “long term loaner units” this will be clearly disclosed in his reviews.

Biography

Matthew Miller

Matthew Miller is an avid mobile device enthusiast who works during the day as a professional naval architect in Seattle. He is one of three hosts on the MobileTechRoundup podcast and runs the Nokia Experts website. Matthew started using mobile devices in 1997 with a US Robotics Pilot 1000 and has owned over 90 different devices running Palm, Linux, Symbian, Newton, BlackBerry, Mac OS X (iPhone), Google Android, and Windows Mobile operating systems. His current collection includes a Nokia N85, Nokia E71, Nokia 5800, Nokia N810, Apple iPhone, HTC Advantage, T-Mobile G1, Palm Treo Pro, HTC Fuze, MSI Wind, MacBook Pro, and many more, along with tons of accessories and classic devices like the Apple Newton MessagePad 2100 and Sony CLIE UX50. Matthew co-authored Master Visually Windows Mobile 2003, was a member of the Nokia Nseries Blogger relations program, and is a member of the invite-only Microsoft Mobius mobile device evangelist group. He can be found on various discussion forums under the user name of "palmsolo".

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RE: Jawbone CEO offers no questions asked refund to UP owners
chadness 9th Dec
To those who are familiar with the UP and the outcry over the problems, this is a useful article, and isn't unlike one that starts talking about the latest iPhone issue or Verizon 4G LTE network problem. It could have used some better links to a back story about the outcry, most certainly! But, I don't think it sounds at all like an advertisement, but more like a story about a rare company going out of their way to treat their customers well. I think it's rare enough to hear about something like this to warrant a story! I don't remember any companies that were part of the capacitor plague telling people they could keep their for free just to make good on their manufacturing defect. Isn't that worth something?
Sorry Matt, why is this here? Reads like an advertisement for the product (and I still don't know what it is).
0 Votes
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Contributr
The UP syncs with iOS devices, post is more anti-advertisement really.
palmsolo (aka Matthew Miller) Updated - 8th Dec
@tonymcs@... You can read both my review and Joel's thoughts following the links in my post and see that the UP is a mobile device with some advanced internal components that also syncs to iOS devices. This is more of a reverse advertisement actually since it is the letter from the UP CEO offering a refund for a product that has many disgruntled owners.
0 Votes
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@tonymcs@...

And the only reason I have an idea what it does is because I followed links which also read like advertisements! Shill? Paid endorsement? Sure reads like one.

And far as I know it works only with the iPhone(?).

This was like listening to my wife, who regularly assumes I know everything she's talking about , because it's all so obvious to her how could I not know.?

Rewrite of opening: The Jawbone UP, the bio-monitoring wristband designed to work with the/a iPad/Phone/Mac/PC, .....
@rmhesche

Agreed. I felt like I had stumbled into the middle of a conversation and I have NO ideal what this up thing is. Still really don't. "Links" embedded in the text don't cut it. Links are for supplemental info, not necessary info -- like the TOPIC of the conversation.
@ tonymcs@... +1
@ palmsolo (aka Matthew Miller) -1

No reality distortion field here. Sorry.
You can do what you want, but please don't try to convince us that you're not doing what you're doing...
Why no Android support? I see it asked on their message boards but nothing. Larger percentage of Android devices out there over iOS. Someone is going to come out with this for the Android crowd and Jawbone will lose out on Millions of sales.
@nmbdave

http://jawbone.com/companion/faq shows a long Android compatibility list. That said, Jawbones CEO's mea culpa does look kinda like an infomercial
@ExEC135CrewDog

Thanks but that is not for the UP. At this time the UP only works with iOS.
0 Votes
+ -
I don't see an issue
lizzzard59@... 9th Dec
I read the prior post about the UP before this one so I knew what this one was talking about. I think these kind of posts are great even if some think they are advertisements. Why? I would never have heard of it otherwise. This is interesting technology.
To me it was an enlightened CEO taking responsibility. Hoo-Ra. I didn't know about the product and the too longwinded letter only partially described it, leading credence that it was NOT an info-mercial.

All in all the gripers and whiners sound Sooo jaded that they can't accept that a CEO would actually be sincere.
The meat of the matter is that this company is willing to take care of their customers. Infomercial or not. I don't even know what the jawbone is or does. But you know what. When I see this company's label on something I'm interested in, that is going count in their favor bigtime. I'm sick of big corporations selling junk and blowing me off when I have problems. I used to sell electronics (record players!) so I know how some companies will go the extra mile and others will leave you with a $1000.00 paperweight. This guy, Hosain Rahman, CEO, Jawbone wants my business and if they offer anything I'm looking to buy, You'd better believe I'm buying it from them.
sorry duplicate post
To those who are familiar with the UP and the outcry over the problems, this is a useful article, and isn't unlike one that starts talking about the latest iPhone issue or Verizon 4G LTE network problem. It could have used some better links to a back story about the outcry, most certainly! But, I don't think it sounds at all like an advertisement, but more like a story about a rare company going out of their way to treat their customers well. I think it's rare enough to hear about something like this to warrant a story! I don't remember any companies that were part of the capacitor plague telling people they could keep their for free just to make good on their manufacturing defect. Isn't that worth something?

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