Beurer BF880 WiFi, Diagnostic Body Scale, light review

 

This is a nice scale, with more functionality than I need.
My about twenty year old scale stopped working, and before i could repair it, a guest by a freak accident smashed the glass…

After considering a score or so of different ones, I ended with this in the somewhat advanced end. That I got about a month ago

I’m not into all this health fanatic stuff at all, but as the price difference was not that huge (this was £50 including shipping) I thought why not…

It overall works nicely, but there are some issues.

First of the accuracy of the weight it self is not that high, it is something like +/- 0.2%. For a single measurement this is ok, but if you want to use it as intended to see trends (they even plot in on a graph in the app), this could mislead, if comparing day to day. It is important that you stand in the same way always.
Leaning slightly forward/backward/sideways matters….

For the analyse part it also matters quite a lot if your feet are wet or dry. Especially the estimates at the bottom changes quite a bit, here from 37.7% to 36.5% muscles

The difference between the two are dry and wet feet only.

So IF you want this to see any trends in body composition, I would strongly advice that you do it e.g. after exiting the bath, and dried your feet, so you always use it with about equally moist feet.

The timestamps in the dumps are also quite wrong, actually over three hours(!), Not that it matters much for a scale, but surprisingly bad, considering that last it synchronised with the scale was perhaps just two weeks ago…. After the next sync, it corrected the 5:08 to 8:18 though, but not the one, one minute before…

It should be noticed that I to save battery I keep BT and WiFi OFF, and only turn it ON for sync. So if the app is open and the phone in range every time you mount the scale, you will not notice this flaw. The manual (see below, section 4.3) says that “up to 30 values will be stored per user“, so even if someone would use it daily no need to frequently use of the app. If used monthly there is a good risk that three normal AA batteries wear out before the buffer is full the “up to” might well mean that this is one user only, so it is a total of 30 – but that is my guess only.

Note also that there are two electrodes only! Though it looks like there are four, the rear ones are fake to make it seem more advanced than it is.
You can see through the tempered glass plate of the scale sideways, and there are nothing under the rear ones. To be absolutely sure i tried with some plastic and it makes no difference if there is contact to any of the two rear ones, but if there aren’t contact to both the front ones, the scale tells the weight-data only.

The front profile are, as many glass plate scales, quite practical. The active part of the scale has the shape of an ∏ with a glass plate on top. This means that if you store it on the floor under some bathroom furniture, you can easily grab hold of the front of the glass plate with your toes and pull it out.

If used by several people with sufficiently difference in weight (You can set the tolerance for this in the app), it can automatically detect which user. If two got almost the same weight you can select the active user on the weight with your toes. (see manual 4.3)
It guesses the user by weight only, not body composition, I guess due to the lack of accuracy in this. Though it would seem smart to include for a man and a women of about the same weight.

The user guide can be found here,