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.
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.
My daughter has a Nokia Lumina Windows 8 phone. We weren’t too surprised that the app is not available for a Windows phone.
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.
Hmmm, maybe that is why they don’t have it in the Google Play store 🙁
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!
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.
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.
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.
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This isn't really a fair review of StarWalk, because ALL activity trackers use Bluetooth Low Energy (aka Bluetooth Smart / Bluetooth 4.0 LE). The newer Garmin / Suunto / Polar watches only work with this newer Bluetooth version; same for Bluetooth heart rate monitors and cadence sensors.
To be compatible with any Bluetooth accessory made within the past 2 years, you need a newer phone. The iPhone 4S (released in 2011) was the first to support it.