Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was so excited to get a Leaf. I joined the waitlist this fall and got a coupon for a free bracelet, and once they became available, I jumped at the chance to redeem it. The first few days I was in love. The Leaf is beautiful, there are several different ways to wear it - clip, bracelet, or necklace - and the app is gorgeous. I faithfully wore it all the time and checked the app frequently to measure my progress. After a couple of weeks, the honeymoon was over as I realized it really wasn't giving me any useful information. Here's what bothered me: * Hypoallergenic Metal - After about a week, the metal started making me itch. * Sleep Tracking - This is the main reason I bought a Leaf. I'm chronically tired, and I wanted to find out some of the factors that influence the quality of my sleep. The Leaf automatically tracks when you fall asleep and when you wake up, but its fall-asleep time was always wrong, often more than an hour off, so I had to manually adjust it the next day. Morning wakeup was always accurate. You get a little chart showing what type of sleep you were in all night, but it didn't even track the times I woke up and had to help my toddler - often for 15 minutes or more - just showed those as asleep. The chart is so tiny that there's no way to tell what time you went into deeper sleep and when you went back to lighter sleep. Below the chart, the Leaf shows you how long you were in bed and a rating: Calm, Restless, or Disturbed. But there's no way to tell why a Calm night was any better than a Restless night. Having pretty purple bars showing light versus deep sleep really isn't helpful if you don't know what a Calm night should look like. I was expecting to be able to click through or maybe even go to a companion website to view an example and explanation of what factors make a night Calm vs. Restless. The Leaf doesn't measure naps at all, so if you hit 90% of your sleep target and then take a nap the next day to catch up, it won't know. And there's no way to manually log it. * Activity Tracking - You set a goal for how many active minutes you want per day, but it only measures when it thinks you're active for 5 minutes continuously. Even when I went shopping and was truly active constantly for an hour, the Leaf didn't think it was continuous, so none of it counted toward my active-minute goal. I'd much rather be able to set a goal of a number of steps. * Breathing Exercises - You have to wear the Leaf as a waistband clip and be connected to the app for these. If you have bulky pants like jeans, it can be hard to fit it on as a clip. The exercises were so-so; I felt like they didn't give enough instructions. When the sounds played I wasn't sure if I was supposed to start taking a breath in or out, or if I was already supposed to have a breath in or out, so again I could not tell why I didn't get a very high accuracy rating. * Cycle Tracking - This was okay. You manually enter your last period and average cycle length, and it gives you little notices each day on when the next one should start and when it thinks you'll ovulate. This wouldn't be very helpful for anyone with irregular cycles, but it was fine for me. * Alarms - One cool feature is being able to set both alarms for specific times, and alarms for lack of movement. You decide how long you want to be inactive before it buzzes. The problem with alarms is, you have to sync the Leaf to the app. One night I was exhausted and wanted to move my morning alarm an hour, so I changed it in the app and pressed sync in the app and double-tapped the Leaf. Unfortunately I didn't realize the sync never completed, and the next morning I was awoken at the earlier time. * Size and Weight - The Leaf is pretty thick, which wasn't too big of a barrier for me. I didn't like how heavy it was, so there was no way I could comfortably wear it as a necklace, and you have to be careful not to wear it on a neckband of a loose shirt or it may flop your shirt down and expose too much skin. Stuff I did love: having a battery I don't have to recharge, how it looks, having options to wear it different ways, being able to set alarms. I absolutely love the idea of the Leaf, but it feels like a beta version right now with limited tracking. The Leaf was an extremely cool idea, the packaging was very high-end, their website and marketing had me drooling, the email notifications about when I'd get my order and why the bracelet shipped separately were top-notch. I'm just really disappointed in the performance. Thankfully, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.