Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My wife and I have FitBit Charge HR watches, and I really liked the idea of the matching scale. However, I think this is a case of a product rushed to market without any deep UAT done on it. Dear FitBit: If the user has to use Google as an end-run around your documentation, you have failed. If there are 598,000 Google results for the terms "aria setup problem", you have failed. To call the setup "frustrating" is charitable. It took me about 2 hours to get it working. The watches were easy to setup, so I naturally projected that simplicity onto the Aria, which set me up for even deeper disappointment. The instructions really are simple - and that's the problem: they simply gloss over parts of what is actually a complex process. The root causes of the setup problem are a cheap, outdated WiFi package, and a half-baked cutesy installation program that needs to be tuned to "try" to setup the connection in a more resilient manner. Secondly, when you've captured info from the user (ie name of the scale, initials, WiFi info) and you have to cycle around for another go at it, why not either automatically re-use the captured info, or at least pre-populate the fields with those values as defaults? Having to constantly re-enter everything over and over again just makes people more angry. To make it easier for the next guy, here's some hints: I set this up using an HP Laptop, Windows 7 with an AT&T U-Verse Motorola NVG589 router, which supports b/n/g by default. The executable installer they have you download is worthless - don't bother. Turn off as many of your other WiFi enabled devices as you can (TV, smartphones, kindle, other PCs, etc), to reduce network "noise." Place the laptop and scale in close proximity to the router (for the record, I had the scale about 15' from the router and the laptop another 20' from that). Follow the prompts, but take it slowly - give each step in the process time to "settle" before attempting to go on to the next step. The setup routine has very tight timeout values, which makes it sensitive to sunspots, the phase of the moon, or the stock market. I suspect the reason that the executable installer fails is because it isn't smart enough to tell if a step has truly finished before barreling on to the next one. Here's a rough overview of how the setup process works: the installer gets the info it needs from you (scale name, your initials, WiFi password); you manually disconnect from your home WiFi network and manually connect to the scale's special network; the installer then sends the captured info (name, initials, WiFi password) to the scale via the scale's network (you lose internet connectivity during this step); the scale then connects to your home WiFi network with those credentials (this is the part that kept failing); you then re-connect to your home WiFi network again, and at that point you should see the scale on your WiFi network. The next piece of information that gets glossed over is how to add more users to the scale, and how to differentiate them. You have to google that, too. What's disappointing is it doesn't really "know" who is using the scale - it makes an educated guess based on the weight. If two of the users are close to each other in weight, you have to go in and manually twiddle the numbers. This product should be re-designed to use Bluetooth; yes, that would require you to pair the scale with another Bluetooth device, but it would virtually eliminate the setup problems. Once you get it all set up, it's great (so far!). Just step on the scale and your data is automatically updated. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the body fat measurement - I have no idea how it's calculated and I haven't gone down that rabbit hole yet. Note: I've been in IT for almost 25 years. I've done everything from COBOL to embedded systems, WiFi to WAN, x86 to M88k. Update: got a new router and have to go through the WiFi setup all over again. Whoever came up with this pairing process needs to be taken out back and shot. The setup is trying to reach "1.scale.www.fitbit.com" - no idea how it's supposed to resolve that address in DNS if you're disconnected from your normal network and connected to the scale's WiFi. The IP assigned to the scale in setup mode appears to be 192.168.240.1 - why not just hard-code that in the setup routine? I can see the Aria scale in the ARP table, and I can ping it, but the setup routine can't find it. You would *think* after tens of thousands of problems with the setup routine, they would have done something. Nope - the executable I downloaded is almost exactly the same as the one I downloaded last July. The other bush-league developer bungle is that the standalone executable has a hard-wired font and window size. I tried to use my wife's laptop to run the setup, and she has the system setup with large fonts because she can't see very well - the setup program can only display a couple words at a time in the window because of the piss-poor UI implementation.