It's an overengineered scale.
Let's face it, at the end of the day the most important thing a scale should do is show you an accurate number representing your body weight.  The additional features that this scale provides are mostly unimportant if you don't get that basic thing right.<br /><br />Unfortunately, this scale will refuse to do this until you go through the steps necessary to connect it to their online service.  This should all be clear from reading the product's description, but I feel it's important to reiterate this: if you're not plunging head-first into the whole fitbit ecosystem, willing to give them your personal information and sign up for their web services, this scale will be a brick.<br /><br />What makes me the most uncomfortable is that It lacks a fallback mode to just &#34;be a scale&#34; if you haven't set it up yet.  The lack of this fallback mode wouldn't be such a big deal though, if it wasn't such a huge pain to get set up:<br /><br />If you're lucky enough to have a computer on your network that has WiFi, it *should* be a simple matter.  But first of all, if you use an ethernet connection, you're out of luck.  You *must* be able to use wifi, even if the scale and your machine connect to the same router.<br /><br />This is because the setup guide relies on being able to switch to the scale's factory-default ad-hoc network, configure the scale, then switch back again.  That means your entire OS, and any applications that are running and maybe using the internet, have to be disconnected and reconnected again to set up your scale.<br /><br />Even that would be fine, if it *worked*.  Unfortunately for me, on OSX 10.9 Mavericks on a circa-2013 iMac, it did not.  I retried 5-6 times, watching as it tried to switch my wifi network to the Aria, switching to my neighbor's WiFi instead (maybe it thought their wireless router was the scale?) timing out, failing, and prompting me to retry.  I tried various methods like manually selecting the Aria from my list of wireless networks, nothing really did it.<br /><br />And this is especially bad when the panic starts to set in... when you realize you just spent upwards of $130 on a scale that *won't even tell you your weight* until you get their little wifi utility working.<br /><br />Eventually I gave up and rebooted into my Windows partition on my same machine, and I had better luck there.  But that experience really put a bad taste in my mouth.<br /><br />Now that it's working, it's logging my weight and sending it wirelessly to fitbit's website.  Cool, I guess.  Don't know what use I'll really have for that.<br /><br />I bought the scale to integrate with the &#34;Lose It!&#34; app I've been using tirelessly on my iPhone for years.  I really wish the scale would just send my weight directly to my phone, but alas, it sends it to fitbit's servers instead, and Lose It syncs with their service indirectly.  This means fitbit could pull the plug on this integration at any time, which makes me nervous.<br /><br />Seeing as how this product is bad at both being a scale (which is really priority number one), and it only indirectly and flimsily supports the only other use case I have (integrating it with &#34;Lose It!&#34;), I'm very close to shipping this back to Fitbit and buying a bluetooth scale instead.
Rating: 2 stars