A publicist sent me the StarWalk dog activity tracker by IQPet to review on my blog.    My daughter has  a very high energy dog who needs a great deal of exercise, so I thought it was a really cool idea!   It is kind of like a Fitbit®  for your dog, and allows you to set daily activity goals for your dog, and compare your dog’s activity data with that of other dogs.

This is what the packaging looks like.

starwalk package

The device is small and lightweight and fairly easily attaches to a collar.  It is easily charged with a USB cable.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the StarWalk dog activity tracker working.   We tried to get it working on several phones, and did not have any luck.   It seems it’s only compatible with iPhone 4s and above, and Samsung Galaxy S3 and above, and a few others.

Here’s the result of our attempts to get it installed.  I should have checked the website for compatible devices first, as I would have saved myself some time and frustration.

Nokia Lumina Windows 8 phone

My daughter has a Nokia Lumina Windows 8 phone.  We weren’t too surprised  that the app is not available for a Windows phone.

Samsung Galaxy S2

So,  I tried downloading the app for my Samsung Galaxy S2 phone.  I could not find it in the Google Play store, so I went to the website and hit the download for Android button.  And this is the result:

Your device isn’t compatible with this version.

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Hmmm, maybe that is why they don’t have it in the Google Play store 🙁

Amazon Firephone

Next, we tried my husband’s Amazon Firephone, which has Google play side loaded onto it.  We successfully installed the app on this phone. Yay!

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  • We watched the tutorial.
  • We created an account.
  • We started to set up the pet profile.  That’s where we got stuck.

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We could not save the pet profile.  Each time we hit the Save icon, it spun for a while.   But nothing happened.  We hit save several times, not sure how to move forward.   Then we’d hit the back button and tried to move to the next step.  However, we could not proceed forward because it said we needed to complete the pet profile.    We went back there and it was gone, so it never saved!

We tried this several times, to no avail.   So, we ended up uninstalling it.

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iPhone 4

Lastly, we tried my other daughter’s iPhone 4.

We got a little farther here.   We were able to get the pet profile loaded, but we could not connect/sync to the device because the “next” button was blocked with a text message saying to start with device turned off, but it was already turned off.

We tried turning the device on and repeating, to no avail.  Then we tried turning it off again, and starting over.  Tried swiping all over the place.  Nothing worked.

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So, all in all, it was pretty frustrating and we cannot use it.  Maybe it only works on newer model phones.     We’re pretty bummed that we can’t get it working on any of our phones.