Hilarious picture. 

NYC's "benevolent tyrant," adorned in fine lavender, at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA. [Bugs & Cranks]

So last week I received the Sleeptracker Elite Pro watch, which I described as "fugly" in my initial review.  I've had a few people ask me what I think, and the good folks at Sleeptracker have even noticed my little blog post, so I figured I owed the world a few of my thoughts.  I've now had the chance to use it a few times and, well, it's still fugly.  But I've sort of gotten the hang of it and used it a few nights.  Here are my initial thoughts.

Pros:

• It works as advertised.  Believe it or not, it actually wakes me up, when I'm already almost awake.  For example, last night I set the alarm for 7:00am, with a wake-up window of 20 minutes, meaning that within 20 minutes of 7am, the watch would wake me up when it sense I was in a state of near wakefulness.
• It does a pretty good job of tracking sleep data.  It apparently gives a very robust analysis of your sleeping when you plug it into a Windows PC, but since I'm an all-Mac guy, I haven't had the chance to experience that yet.  However, you can browse through your moments of wakefulness right on the watch, and get a sense of how well, or how poorly, you slept.  The watch gives you a stat called "Data A," which is the average amount of time between moments of wakefulness.  According to the manual, most people average between 20-35 minutes.  I've consistently been around 25 minutes, and I guess you're supposed to try to get that "Data A" number as high as possible.
  

Cons:

• It beeps rather loudly with every button press.  I don't understand why you would design a watch with a really loud beep, to be used by people in their bedrooms while half-asleep.  It's possible to turn the beep off by pushing the light button, which is a nice feature (the watch assumes that if you need the light, I guess, that you probably don't want the beeping - good assumption).  However, if you're in the alarm-setting mode, and the light goes off, you can't get the light to turn back on, and it's beeping again.  This is actually a pretty big deal, because one of the main reasons I bought the watch was to have something to use without waking up my sleeping wife and baby.  Now I've got this loud beeping thing - I actually stepped into the hallway last night to set it, because my wife was already asleep in the bedroom.  While there is a workaround, there should be a global "all silent" setting, like there is on every digital watch I've ever owned.
  
• It is so hideously ugly and doesn't perform most digital watch functions.  Now, I know I'm really harping on this.  But it's an almost-$200 watch.  I'm not going to wear this to work.  In fact, I can't really even wear it around outside, because it lacks most of the basic functions on even the cheapest Casio digital watches.  There's no timer, or stopwatch.  There's no "non-Sleeptracker" alarm.  Unfortunately, the designers have made it the type of device that you can only use for one thing - and I consider that a limitation.
• The software doesn't work with Mac.  I knew this when I bought it.  Still, it's a bummer. 
  

So, the good news is, it works.  It wakes me up before my alarm.  So that's pretty cool.  The bad news is, I'm not sure it's worth $179.  They sell a basic watch for under $100 - if I were advising a friend on the purchase, I'd go with that one.  It's even a lot less ugly than the more expensive version (seriously guys whose idea was to use neon green from the 80s as a design theme?).  There are still a few weeks left on my 30-day money-back guarantee, so I'm going to keep using it.  I'll continue to update this post with more thoughts.

I'm going to follow up with a video review as well to highlight some of these thoughts, which I'll post in a day or two.  Thanks.

Hey, this is kind of neat.  I had no idea people who actually read this crazy blog I started, much less the company that makes one of the products I wrote about.  The good folks at Sleeptracker linked to my post about the watch.  Cool.  I should write my review  now.  In fact, I think I'll do just that.

"Posterous was always meant to have mass appeal, get millions of *new* people blogging. But at the same time, we have to take care of the early adopters, without them we wouldn't be here today."

When you're building a company, you sometimes have to leave your original user base behind and focus on mass appeal

  Posted by Sachin Agarwal

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Or I can find a friend with a Windows PC who will let me download BlackBerry Desktop Manager, whichever comes first.  In any case, I've never loved my iPod Touch more.

Since I was in the neighborhood of a T-Mobile store this morning, I took my dead Blackberry in to see if they had a way to fix it.  Googling around last night, I learned that the only way to fix my dead Blackberry was to do a full restore using the BlackBerry desktop manager on a PC.  Problem is, I don't have a PC.

This is exactly what I learned, via Google, at 8pm last night.  And this is exactly what the good folks at the T-Mobile store at the Arsenal Mall in Watertown told me.  So I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

So I have a dead phone, and have to find a friend with a Windows PC to bum off of (or wait until RIM releases the BlackBerry Desktop Manager for Mac).  Not sure where I go from here.