When my coworker told me about the Water.io Smart Water Bottle that makes sure you’re drinking enough water, I knew I couldn’t be a better candidate to test it out. It’s incredibly difficult for me to stay hydrated; often, I’d realize at night that I hadn’t had any water all day. Even a dehydration-induced two-month-long kidney disease in the summer of 2012 couldn’t get me to change my habits. I was hoping the Water.io Smart Water Bottle could do that. But it couldn’t.
Water.io Smart Water Bottle
The Smart Water Bottle is better for tracking hydration than pushing you towards it.
Pros
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App offers excellent flexibility
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Gamified concept with tons of rewards
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Long battery life
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Good for tracking water intake
Cons
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Bottle doesn’t show hydration progress
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Overly lenient and misleading status updates
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Have to navigate to the app for an overview
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Uses a proprietary magnetic charger
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Better for tracking than ensuring hydration
How it works
You start by downloading the bottle’s companion app on your phone and introducing yourself to it by answering a couple of quick questions about your age, sex, height, weight, etc. The app utilizes that intel to store and inform you about your recommended daily water intake.
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The bottle sends you regular hydration reminders throughout the day by having its cap vibrate and light up in a color of your choice. The cap also embeds dual monitoring sensors that track the amount (down to the milliliter) of water you drink throughout the day. Your figures are updated on the app as soon as you’re done drinking and putting the bottle down on a flat surface.
You can tilt the bottle to check if you’re on track at any point during the day. The LED ring on the cap will flash green if you are and orange if you’re not. To review your progress so far, head to the app. If you successfully meet your goal for the day, the cap will light up in rainbow colors as a congratulatory gesture.
Where it failed
For some reason, the app used my answers to its hydration quiz to set a pretty low water intake goal for me. Online water intake calculators have always recommended somewhere between 1.6 and 2.6 liters, but the Smart Water Bottle suggested that my total daily hydration amount be 1.3 liters. I manually adjusted the goal on the app and raised it to 1.6 liters.
During the ten-day review period, I complied with the bottle reminders and was hydrated whenever asked, apart from my regular need to drink water whenever I genuinely felt thirsty. I’d check the green/orange on-track/off-track status often throughout the day and mostly find it on green.
After a few days of obediently complying with every hydration reminder and always having the cap light up in green, I was confused about why my efforts hadn’t been celebrated with a rainbow yet. When I navigated to the calendar option on the app to look at my progress rings for the past week, I learned that I hadn’t met my goal even once.
This bottle’s biggest flaw is that it doesn’t inform you how far behind on your goal you are. For that information, you have to head to the app, which is not something you’ll likely be doing multiple times a day, nor is the point of this bottle. There are free hydration-tracking apps for that.
The only way the bottle keeps you updated on your goal is by flashing green or orange, which translates to being on or off-track. And this specific metric is so lenient that it doesn’t benefit anyone. It flashed green for me on days when I couldn’t meet even half of my total goal. The only time it would flash orange was when I’d come home to the bottle after a long day of not using it. But I noticed quickly that taking a few sips would make it green again, which was deceiving. It doesn’t merit a green light if I’ve just started my daily water intake.
It would have been a far better idea to have the LED ring on the bottle’s cap work as a progress tracker, with the perimeter as the total water intake goal. The circle would slowly fill up as you’d come closer to meeting it, just as it works on the app. This would’ve worked much better in conveying a more precise overview of approximately how much more you need to drink for the rest of the day. Coupled with the overly lenient and outright deceptive on-track/off-track metric, it made me extremely misinformed about my intake goals.
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It’s shameful, I know, but one day out of the ten days I reviewed this bottle, I got a rainbow. It was so discreet that I would’ve easily missed it if I hadn’t already happened to have the bottle in hand as I refilled it.
Unlike the loud hydration reminders and demand attention, the celebratory rainbow shows up for an extremely brief moment, only when you tilt the bottle to one side, without vibration, and extremely quietly. I was pretty underwhelmed after looking forward to it for days. With a celebration so invisible that it’d easily go unnoticed, it’s not very encouraging. Interestingly, I didn’t exactly meet my goal on even this day. I guess it awards you even when you’re close.
If you’re going ahead with this bottle, remember that it’s one extra device to add to the ever-growing list of devices that need to be charged. It took an hour to hit 100%, and it lasted ten days until the cap started flashing red to indicate a low battery. Ten days is a good enough battery life on a device if it’s offering sufficient value, though.
But with magnetic charging on this bottle, you’d need its specific proprietary cable. That’s one extra cable to think about and care for, which instantly puts me off looking at how we’re finally getting closer to having a universal charging standard. Also, if you lose the cable, you’d need to shell out $7 to buy it on the site.
Where it passed
The Water.io Smart Water Bottle is a bottle I’d buy anyway, based on its design, even if it didn’t offer any smart features. It features a sleek, robust body and an extremely lightweight build. My review unit included the $10 handle (sold separately) that I found pretty useful.
The companion app has a slightly janky interface and is prone to crashing. But if you can get past its low-quality UI, it’s packed with features and rewards. It lets you manually add any physical activities you did during the day and adjust your goal based on those. You can manually add hydration outside the bottle, such as coffee, wine, etc.
There are dozens of badges to help motivate you and a leaderboard to celebrate the most efficient water drinkers. I was happier than I’d like to admit when I received my first (and only) badge.
Is it worth it?
Water.io’s Smart Water Bottle desperately needs a progress tracker on the bottle itself. Its on-track/off-track status updates also need to be far smarter. Throughout my review period, the bottle barely tried to get me to hydrate because it was always green and had a positive status, even when I was extremely behind on my goal.
Apart from the very helpful reminders, the desire to see complete progress circles on the in-app calendar, earn badges, and unlock rewards greatly encouraged me to hydrate. Water.io gamifies hydration for you, and it’s admittedly enjoyable. However, online hydration trackers and apps can do the same without spending $70. The bottle auto-inputs your water intake via the sensors, which is impossible on a hydration app. The Water.io Smart Water Bottle is better for tracking hydration than pushing you towards it.
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