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Welcome to David Pogue’s Rated:App series. Each week, I install whatever is the No. 1 bestselling app on the iOS or Android store and review it, to save you the effort in case it’s a turkey!

This week, the No. 1 most downloaded app on Android store, and No. 2 on iPhone, is a game called Player Unknown: Battlegrounds, better known as PUBG.

Why is it No. 1? Because it’s free, because it just came out for phones, and because it’s already crazy popular. Its PC/console versions made PUBG the most-played new video game of 2017.

In PUBG, you explore the island, looking for people to kill.

Meet the battle royale

PUBG is a “battle royale” game, meaning that it’s a military-style, free-for-all, fight to the death. It’s extremely similar to its arch-rival, Fortnite: Battle Royale (which is also free, and is currently neck-and-neck with PUBG on the iOS app store [not available yet for Android]).

At the very start of the game (after choosing the look, gender, race, and screen name for your avatar), you’re in sort of a limbo where you can run around, practice punching and crouching, waiting for 100 players from the internet to accumulate. Once they do, the action cuts to a plane flying high above an island. You choose when to jump out, at which point you skydive, and eventually pop your parachute.

Geronimo! You can control your direction as you skydive.

You explore this island by running around (the “camera” is always behind you) or hopping onto rusty old cars, tanks, or motorcycles. As you go, you find and pick up weapons, protective gear, medical kits, and energy drinks. But be wise: You can carry only so much weight — and you can hold only two guns at a time.

If you’re in Squad mode, getting shot by the enemy doesn’t necessarily mean Game Over. You’re just wounded at first, and your teammates can help you back to your feet.

As time goes by, the playing area slowly contracts, forcing players into a tighter space and heightening the action. The walls, in the form of a creepy blue shimmering bubble, slowly close in on you; if you’re caught inside it, you lose Health.

Beware the shimmering blue dome. It’s closing in, forcing players into tighter proximity.

Oh yeah — it’s also best to avoid the Red Zone: an occasional region of bombardment that will get you killed if you’re not inside a building.

Your objective, of course, is to kill people by shooting them. If you (or your team) are the last alive, you earn the famous “winner winner chicken dinner” screen.

Hey! You won!

Now, depending on your age and temperament, you may be slightly aghast to learn that the most popular phone app in the world encourages the brutal killing of total strangers. As a parent, even I caught my breath to see YouTube videos of PUBGers in action.

On the other hand, if we’re going to start objecting to violent video games, we’ve got a much bigger problem than this little app.

Approaching an injured enemy to finish him off and take his ammo.

The PUBG controversy

One nice thing about PUBG is that even your first time out, you can have some success. You might even get yourself some chicken dinner.

Don’t get too cocky, though. At the beginning levels, many of your enemies are just clumsy, slow bots, put there by the software company to give you something to shoot at. As a novice, I found that to be a clever and welcome idea, but experienced gamers are mightily annoyed at what feels like patronizing, sissy training wheels and manufactured popularity.

But there’s a larger controversy surrounding PUBG Mobile: Lots of people are running this app on their PCs (in a phone emulator) or on a Chromebook (an Android laptop). That way, they can avoid paying $30 for the actual PC version of the game. And that way, use their keyboard and mouse, which gives them a huge speed and control advantage over the poor slobs whose only controls are the phone’s touch screen.

There’s no solution in sight. And plenty of gaming pundits think that this “PUBG on the PC” problem might ultimately ruin the game.

But how is it?

PUBG’s graphics and sound are really good (they scale to the abilities of your phone); if you listen with earbuds on, the sounds actually clue you in to the location of enemy fire. (There’s an on-screen directional indicator, too.) The controls are generally about as good as you can find on a phone touchscreen, although many PUBG’ers complain that they fire their guns accidentally — the “shoot” button is right in the path of the thumb you use to look around you.

If you find a vehicle, you can make better time exploring the island.

If a military-style battle royale sounds like your kind of gig, you’ll find a lot of satisfaction in PUBG. It requires both luck and skill; it gives everyone a shot at the poultry meal; it raises your heart rate and, at times, makes you crack up. Just try to avoid mashing your thumbs all the way through your screen.

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s [email protected]. You can sign up to get his stuff by email, here.  

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You’ve probably been using computer mice for over 30 years (or for as much of 30 years as you’ve been alive). So it might come as something of a shock to learn that, as Steve Jobs might have said, you’re holding it wrong.

That, at least, is the opinion of many ergonomic experts and people who treat repetitive-stress injuries. When you use a regular mouse for many hours a day, you’re doing two terrible things to yourself:

You’re twisting your arm inward to make your hand flat. This pronation tightens the joint space of your two forearm bones, which is unnatural and, eventually, can be painful.

The weight of your arm is on the underside of your wrist, pressed against the desk (especially if you move the mouse using your wrist as a pivot). You’re squishing the carpal tunnel, the tiny tube that lets your median nerve run from your elbow to your hand. Enough of that, and you get the pain and tingling of carpal tunnel syndrome.

There’s a fairly brilliant solution to all of this: Use a vertical mouse. To understand the concept, imagine rotating your standard mouse like this:

Imagine if you could rotate your mouse hand: that’s the idea.

Now your hand is in a more natural position all day, like you’re shaking hands or holding an ice-cream cone — and it’s virtually impossible to rest your wrist on the desk. You’re encouraged to move the mouse from the elbow, which takes all the performance anxiety away from your wrist.

In some companies, vertical mice are standard-issue equipment, just to avoid employee problems and workman’s-comp claims.

A vertical mouse puts your hand in a comfortable, non-twisted position.

I don’t currently have pain. But I went through an awful period, years ago, when I suffered tenosynovitis (inflammation of the tendon sheaths) in my mouse wrist. It got so bad, I had to stop using the computer for months (and, worse, playing the piano). What I learned from the journey is the importance of comfort, adjustability, and variation in the tools we use for hours a day.

And this I can tell you: Even if you have no pain, you will say “Oh, WOW” the first time you slip your hand onto a vertical mouse. (I’ve watched a lot of people try them out this week.) This kind of mouse is immediately more comfortable and more natural to hold.

Adjusting to it takes between five minutes and an hour, and I’ve heard that these mice aren’t great for gamers. But the point is that you might well fall in love with one of these things even if you don’t have any pain.

Maybe you’d just rather not get pain.

Here’s what your hand looks like when you use a vertical mouse: not flat.

The contenders

I rounded up nine vertical mice in an effort to find a winner. Here’s what they have in common:

Right and left mouse buttons and a clickable scroll wheel.

On the thumb side, back/forward buttons for web pages. (Unfortunately, the back/forward buttons work only on Windows, not Macs.

Adjustable DPI settings, meaning a choice of tracking speeds. There’s a physical button for switching speeds, so you can switch between fast tracking on a web page, or slow tracking in Photoshop.

All of them require a tiny USB nubbin to sit in one of your USB jacks all day long, a special receiver. On one hand, the companies say that their proprietary wireless technology is more reliable than Bluetooth, and point out that this arrangement requires no driver, no setup, no pairing — just plug and play. On the other hand, you have to sacrifice a USB jack forever.

Most vertical mice come with a USB receiver.

All of these are wireless, but all are also available in wired versions, usually for a few bucks less. Except as noted, they’re not available in left-handed versions.

In the end, I found three winners.

Evoluent Vertical Mouse ($90)

A pretty chunky piece of kit, available in three sizes. This mouse definitely fills your entire hand, like you’re gripping a pencil sharpener. But it’s by far the most programmable vertical mouse. You get three buttons, not two, plus buttons above and below your thumb’s spot. And here’s the killer feature: All of it is programmable using the free Mac or Windows software. (Each button can trigger a click, right-click, double-click, open link in new tab, page up/down, etc.)

You get dedicated +/–tracking-speed buttons, with LED indicators that show you which setting you’re at. Available in a Bluetooth model. Takes one AA battery.

The popular Evoluent mouse has three buttons.

Contour Unimouse ($80)

Incredibly, this is the only adjustable vertical mouse I could find. Imagine a clamshell, with the hinge against your palm: you can swing the top open between 30 and 90 degrees, and it stays where you put it. You can find the angle you like best, or, better, vary the angle throughout the day. (As the company says: “Posture variation is the cornerstone of ergonomics.”)

The thumb rest on the inside, too, is adjustable: Push it forward/back, up/down, in/out, or rotate it. Three-button mouse; the middle button can be either “double-click” or “middle-click” (for closing a web page, for example). Ten DPI settings. Has a rechargeable battery, three months on a charge; you can use it as a wired mouse while it’s charging (over a USB cable).

The Contour Unimous adjusts its angles to fit your hand, or to change through the day.

The downside: Not as instantly soothing when you grip it, because your fingers remain straight; it doesn’t curve, as the other mice do. Not great-looking, with the exposed inner hinge stuff.

The Contour Unimouse adjusts in lots of different ways.

Perixx Perimice 713 ($15)

There isn’t a ton of difference between all the sub-$20 vertical mice. They’re all deliciously sculpted, like a curved shark’s fin, with fantastic comfort as they nestle into the crook of your palm.

If I had to choose one basic vertical mouse, though, this would be it (and, in fact, I did buy it for myself). It’s sleek, curved, futuristic, German-made, with a light rubbery coating that feels really amazing. Three DPI settings. Takes two AAA batteries. And cost $15.

The Perixx Perimice 713 is gloriously comfortable, shown here from the side (left) and top.

The rest

Here are my notes on the rest of the field.

Anker AK-98ANWVM-UBA ($20). Super comfortable, smooth, curved shape. Three DPI settings (the switching button is on the inner top ridge). Available in a wired version for $5 less. The USB dongle fits into a compartment underneath for travel. Takes two AAA batteries.

Here’s the Sharkk Wireless Mouse–so named because of is fin-like shape—AKA the Anker.

Sharkk Wireless Mouse ($18). How super freaky weird is this? This mouse is identical to the Anker. I mean, it’s the exact same mouse — same paint job, design, buttons, size, shape, performance. One of those companies is just rebranding the same mouse from the other (or both from a third party); both companies refused to say which it is.

Ergoguys Comfi II ($40). Shiny, rounded surface. Choice of colors. Three DPI settings. Takes one AA battery. Errors in instructions. Really nice, but nearly three times the price of the Perixx. Compartment underneath for the USB dongle.

The Ergoguys Comfi II is a curved plastic swirl.

Ergoguys WowPen Joy II ($21). Rechargeable battery (over a USB cable). Great shape — not so much shark-fin, more like, I don’t know, you’re gripping a chunk of modeling clay. Errors in the instruction sheet. Good for smaller hands. Three DPI settings. Scroll wheel is kind of low. Compartment underneath for the USB dongle.

The Ergoguys WowPen Joy II fattens toward the bottom.

Posturite Penguin ($90). I get it — looks like a penguin. Ha. Available in three sizes. You grip this one like it’s a joystick; buttons are facing away from you, with a horizontal scroll wheel as the “mouth” in between them. Kind of mushy buttons. Antimicrobial coating against “bacteria and mold.” Four DPI settings. Battery-charge warning light. Ambidextrous design — use with right or left hand. The bowtie is the switch from right- to left-handed scrolling; why on earth would they dedicate such a rarely changed setting to such a prominent, easily hit button? Ergonomics should never be second to cuteness.

The Posturite Penguin has a radical, maybe even adorable design.

Kinesis DXT Mouse 2 ($81). The only vertical mouse that you’re not intended to wrap your hand around. It’s super tiny; you’re supposed to manipulate it with your fingertips. The company maintains that this design is even better for ergonomic purposes, but it drove me crazy. Ambidextrous, no extra buttons. Four DPI settings. Rechargeable battery (by USB).

The Kinesis DXT Mouse 2 is super tiny and ambidextrous.

I’m not buying the argument that Bluetooth wouldn’t work; plenty of wireless mice use Bluetooth just fine, and I’d rather not sacrifice a USB jack to a wireless mouse when it’s not necessary.

Otherwise, though, I’m completely sold. I have a feeling that once you try a vertical mouse, you will be, too.

Then you’ll be ready to confront the ergonomic horror shows that are your flat keyboard, fixed desk, and awkward chair.

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s [email protected]. You can sign up to get his stuff by email, here.  

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The Fitbit Versa smartwatch is small, cheap and sweet Google and Levi’s created a digital jean jacket. Here’s what I think of it Google Clips uses AI to snap pictures of your kids and pets — sort of Why I bought Honda’s plug-in hybrid mystery car Look up! A dozen ‘air taxi’ flying cars are readying for takeoff

On Monday, the stock market did something weird. Sure, it was sinking through the day — but then, at about 4 p.m. ET, it plummeted. Nobody could figure out why. There was no big headline, no sudden announcement.

“The drop in the morning was caused by humans, but the free-fall in the afternoon was caused by the machines,” wealth manager Walter “Bucky” Hellwig told Bloomberg.

Hup — there it is. Algorithmic trading caused the flash crash.

My “Midday Movers” producer asked me to offer an explainer for “algo trading,” as it’s nicknamed —but really, it’s not hard to grasp. Algo is when you program software to buy or sell stocks automatically, based on timing, price, quantity, or some mathematical model.

Algorithmic trading has a number of benefits: It rules out human emotion; it places trades instantly and precisely, locking in at the values you want; and lets institutional investors (like mutual funds and insurance companies) buy or sell huge quantities of stock in many smaller blocks, so as not to affect the stock price in the process.

Algo trading also, however, tends to magnify upward or downward trends, as we saw yesterday. Fortunately, the market largely recovered after the algo-driven selloff — maybe because humans came back to their desks.

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s [email protected]. You can sign up to get his stuff by email, here.  

DJI is the 800-pound gorilla of the drone world. At this point, every time the Chinese company introduces a new drone, it’s basically cannibalizing sales of its own existing products.

Never will that become more true than next week, when its new Mavic Air drone is unveiled. Far smaller than the older Mavic Pro, the Air folds up small enough to fit into a coat pocket — its most important feature by far.

But the Mavic Air is less expensive, too ($800 including remote controller), yet still does 4K video capture from a camera that’s on a 3-axis gimbal (meaning super-stable video). The Air has sensors on the back, so that it can avoid collisions, either forward or backward.

You can control the Air with hand motions, just as you can the $400, non-folding, equally small DJI Spark. In fact, you can use even more motions.

On the Spark, those “use the force” hand gestures were iffy. Sometimes, the drone just looked at you dumbly no matter how spastically you did the gestures. When I review the new Air next week, I’ll see if DJI has managed to improve that feature.

In the meantime, on paper, anyway, the Mavic Air is one juicy semi-pro drone indeed!

—

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s [email protected]. You can sign up to get his stuff by email, here. 

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For normal people, the end of the year is a time for celebration, vacation, and family.

For people in the tech industry, though, it’s a time of frantic preparation for the biggest trade show in the Western Hemisphere: CES.

The Consumer Electronics Show takes place in Las Vegas every January, perfectly timed to drain the joy out of the holidays for 170,000 people. It’s not open to the public — only to members of the industry and the media that covers it.

The Consumer Electronics Show comes once a year, whether we like it or not.

The purpose of the show is for nearly 4,000 companies to show off what they’re working on. When will these products reach stores shelves? Some of it soon, some of it next year, and lots of it, never.

Every year, everyone wants to know: What was new at CES? The world is hungry for an exciting answer, like, “Oh, there’s this thing called an iPad!” or “They showed this car called a Tesla!”

But every year, there are fewer new breakout inventions; at CES 2018 last week, I’d say there were zero. (In fact, the most talked-about display at CES last week was when the power went out for two hours. At an electronics show. #irony.)

Instead, CES these days is more about the same buzzword, technologies seep into existing products from across the industry, cross fertilizing. This year, six of these seeping technologies were on display — which, for your convenience, I’ve boiled down to a handy acronym: VICTOR.

It stands for voice, Internet of Things, cars, TVs, oddballs, and robots.

Voice

At this point, you probably know that the Amazon Echo is that cylinder that sits in your house and responds to voice commands, kind of like Siri for the home. Google has its own copycat version, called Google Home. These things are incredibly popular — already, they’re in 16% of American homes.

Both Amazon and Google have been aggressively encouraging other companies to build their voice technologies into their own appliances: refrigerators, light switches, lamps, speakers, robo-vacuums, TVs, headphones, security cameras, door locks, washers, dryers, cars, and so on. “Works with Amazon Alexa!” and “Works with OK Google!” signs were everywhere at CES last week.

You couldn’t swing a cat without hitting an Alexa-enabled product.

What’s great is that this isn’t an either/or thing. It’s not another Betamax/VHS war, or a Blu-ray/HD-DVD war. Since Alexa and “OK Google” are just software, there’s nothing to stop them from coexisting in the same product. The Sonos One speaker, Vivitar smart speaker, and new TiVo models, for example, can all understand commands barked in either command language.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things, of course, is the nonsensical name for home devices that are networkable, so that we can control them by pulling out our phones and opening an app. For something that’s supposed to make our lives simpler and easier, that’s too much hassle. Consumers have been staying away in droves.

What may save the “I” in VICTOR is the “V” in VICTOR — voice control. “Alexa, is the dryer done yet?” “Hey Google, make it two degrees warmer in here.” “Alexa, lock the doors.” “OK Google, I want to watch ‘Rambo.’”

That arrangement actually works — and was everywhere at CES 2018. Samsung and LG, among others, demonstrated entire model living rooms and kitchens filled with appliances waiting for your verbal command.

An LG employee shows how its new fridge has six cameras inside that let you see its contents.

Cars

The self-driving car courses at CES were a third bigger than last year. Every car company you’ve ever heard of, and a few you haven’t, were demonstrating their self-driving prototypes. Lyft was even giving a few lucky showgoers rides around town in self-driving cars.

Sleek-looking concept cars filled the CES exhibit halls.

For 10 years, people have been saying that these cars would hit the roads in 2020 — and guess what? Unlike most heavily hyped new technologies, this horizon isn’t receding. People are still saying 2020. That means it’s probably real.

Lots of people were also talking about Toyota’s e-Palette, a prototype self-driving store.

Toyota envisions its E-Palette as a self-driving store, delivery van, or even hotel room.

TVs

CES show floors have always been dominated by massive walls of brilliant TV screens, and this year was no exception. The industry is still hard at work pushing us to buy 4K TV screens, which have four times the number of pixels as hi-def screens. Only one problem: You can’t see the difference from a normal seating distance.

As it does every year, LG created a dazzling wall of TV screens—this time, in an undulating canyon.

Even if you could see it, there’s very little to watch. Not a single TV network or cable channel broadcasts in 4K. If you own a 4K television, and you want to watch 4K shows and movies, you have two choices: Buy a 4K Blu-ray player and buy new movies on disc — or stream your shows online, from services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, and YouTube.

In short, 4K is kind of a hoax.

(What you can see — what is worth upgrading to — is a much less catchy format. It’s called HDR, for high dynamic range. Much brighter brights, much darker darks; more detail in those bright and dark places; and more shades in between. More shades of color, too. Really fantastic.)

So the forehead-slapping breakthrough of CES 2018 was — get this — 8K screens. That’s right: four times as many pixels as 4K. If 4K was a stupid hoax, then 8K is four times as stupid. Really? They think we’re going to re-buy all our movies on disc again, to play on another new special disc player?

Samsung displayed a new display technology called MicroLED, which it claims to be as great-looking as OLED but at a lower price and less chance of burn-in. Cooler yet, the company proposes selling these TVs as one-foot, borderless tiles, which you can assemble to make as big a TV as you like. The one on the show floor, at 146 inches diagonal, dubbed “The Wall,” was a huge hit with showgoers.

LG also displayed (in an off-floor, invitation-only hotel area) a huge flat screen TV that rolls up. It’s built like an upside-down window shade; when you need the screen to get smaller, it wraps up around a roller at the bottom, hidden inside a wooden box.

LG’s prototype TV rolls upward or downward into the box below, to fit the video material.

Why? Because, the company says, you may want to watch different movies or shows that have different screen proportions. The real reason, of course, is, “Because we could.”

Oddball things

The “O” in VICTOR is the catch-all for all kinds of other crazy stuff on display. Walk the 50 football fields’ worth of exhibit space, and you’d find:

Two laundry-folding machines. One, the Foldimate, will cost $980 but will require you to attach each piece of clothing to clips; the other, the Laundroid, will go for $16,000 but does everything for you.

A full-body suit for playing virtual-reality games, so that bullets can “hit” you anywhere, or you can walk into a hot or cold virtual place, and you’ll feel it.

An electronic breast pump that you wear secretly inside your bra as you go about your day.

A tiny, battery-free sensor that you wear on your fingernail to detect excessive exposure to UV light.

Another stab at the Google Glass concept. This time, the virtual screen is superimposed on your field of view by a full pair of sunglasses.

Not one, not two, but three self-driving suitcases that follow you through the airport.

The Puppy 1 self-driving suitcase balances on two wheels, using technology adapted from Segway.

Remember my exhaustive (and exhausting) report about the struggles of the through-the-air charging industry? The products that can charge your gadgets at a distance? Well, the FCC just approved some of these products, including the Energous three-foot charging system. The very first product to include it is called the Myant Skiin, a line of clothing that tracks your vital statistics as you wear it.

Robots

No surprise here: Robotics and automation were the stars of the show. Heck, they’re the stars of every show right about now. Everywhere you looked, there were shiny white plastic robo-things with big eyes and smiley mouths to look less threatening. Most of them seemed to be “because we could” designs, rather than “you need one of these.”

Here and there, though, you could spot far more purpose-built robots:

Honda displayed a series of robots designed for specific tasks: an all-terrain model for outdoor work; a self-balancing wheelchair; and a weird, globule-shaped, huggable “empathy robot” with facial expressions projected onto its face from within.

LG offered three new robots for commercial use: one for restaurants, to deliver food or drinks; one for hotels, to carry luggage up to your room; and one for grocery stores, which guides you to the food shelf you’re looking for, and scans the package as you drop it into its hopper.

LG’s new service robots are designed for restaurants, hotels, and grocery stores.

Sony is re-introducing its Aibo robotic dog, this time in a more advanced, more puppy-like incarnation (probably $1,700 when it hits the U.S.). Sensors make the dog respond appropriately when you pet it or swat it; it learns your voice over time and seeks you out; and, like the original Aibo, it plays fetch with a pink ball.

Omron built a ping-pong-playing robot — not ever intended to be for sale, but to show off its robot-making skills.

Just to make sure all of Vegas’s bases were covered, the Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club featured two pole-dancing stripper robots as a CES gimmick.

Hail to the VICTORs

So, you get it: Same as last year, just more of it.

If all of that seems like a lot to read, well hey — here’s a rhyme to make it go down easier:

V is for the voice control in every gadget here — “Alexa, do my bidding!”… “OK Google, bring my beer!” In TVs, cars, and speakers, it’s a miracle of choice. The world’s at your command — at least if you don’t lose your voice!

I is for the second realm, called Internet of Things, It’s networked household stuff, complete with all the fun that it brings It’s thermostats, refrigerators, all your kitchen gear… So far, nobody’s buying it — but hey, perhaps next year.

C is for self-driving cars! So many at this show! We’re told they’re really coming soon — about two years to go. T is for the TV screens on all the expo floors. They look amazing when they’re here — but less so once they’re yours. 

O is for the oddball stuff! The offbeat and bizarre: This laundry-folding robot, or this crazy concept car. R is for the robots — Sony’s puppy stole my show. This grocery bot asks what you want, then shows you where to go.

So there’s your whole mnemonic — VICTOR! Hope you liked the show And don’t forget the greatest part — you didn’t have to go!

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s [email protected]. You can sign up to get his stuff by email, here.  

Read more:

Exclusive: What Fitbit’s 6 billion nights of sleep data reveals about us

Tech that can help you keep your New Year’s resolutions

Pogue’s holiday picks: 8 cool, surprising tech gifts

Google’s Pixel Buds: Wireless earbuds for the extremely tolerant

Study finds you tend to break your old iPhone when a new one comes out

Rejoice: Sonos Speakers are finally voice-controllable

Follow Yahoo Finance on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn

How we sleep is unbelievably important. Getting too little sleep not only makes you feel lousy and cranky, but it’s also linked to obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and even early death. (No pressure.)

But it’s amazingly hard to measure our sleep, as a population. Sure, one person at a time can stay overnight at a sleep lab, hooked up to scalp electrodes — but try sleeping normally that way, away from home and wired to strange equipment. Other sleep studies use self-reporting, where you write down each morning how you slept, but that data is famously unreliable.

Now, though, there’s a new way to study our sleep: Fitness bands, worn by millions of people. Most of Fitibit’s bands, for example, have built-in heart-rate monitors, which produce much more accurate sleep-measurement results than earlier bands. These bands track your sleep automatically, in your own bed, on your normal schedule, under normal conditions.

Since Fitbit began tracking sleep stages in March 2017, it has collected data from 6 billion nights of its customers’ sleep. This is a gold mine — by far the largest set of sleep data ever assembled. (This data is anonymous and averaged; it’s not associated with individual customers’ names.)

“It’s a really, really exciting and really rare data set,” Fitbit data scientist Karla Gleichauf says. “It’s probably the largest biometric data set in the world.”

The measurements include not just how long you sleep, but what stages of sleep you experience. Each morning, the Fitbit app shows which parts of the night you spent in REM sleep (the vivid-dreams stage, good for mood regulation and memory processing), in deep sleep (good for memory, learning, the immune system, and feeling rested), in light sleep, and awake. (It’s always disheartening to see how much of the night you waste in little one- or two-minute wake-ups that you don’t even remember.)

Each morning, the Fitbit app shows how you slept.

But wait, there’s more. The Fitbit app also knows your gender, age, weight, height, location, and activity level. Therefore, the company’s data scientists can slice and dice its massive sleep database in fantastic ways. They should be able to tell us who sleeps more: men or women. Northerners or Southerners. East Coasters or West Coasters. They should be able to calculate our national average bedtime. They should be able to draw all kinds of conclusions about the way we sleep — and what’s good for us.

Now, for the first time, they have. Gleichauf and her boss, Conor Heneghan, Fitbit’s lead sleep research scientist, agreed to mine that vast sleep database to unearth some of its secrets. Some of their findings reinforce what sleep scientists have already studied; some have never been measured before.

Here’s what Fitbit discovered — a Yahoo Finance exclusive.

Men vs. women

Women sleep 25 minutes longer a night than men. They average six hours and 50 minutes of sleep a night, whereas men get only six hours and 26 minutes. Neither group gets anywhere close to the recommended eight hours a night.

Women get about 25 minutes more sleep a night than men.

Women also get about 10 minutes more REM sleep than men every night, too — a gap that widens after age 50.

Why these differences? “It’s really not known if it’s a physiology thing, is it a cultural thing, who knows,” Heneghan says. “I think that would be super exciting over the next 10, 20 years for people to really get into why.”

The news for women isn’t all good, though: They’re 40% more likely to suffer from insomnia — trouble falling asleep — than men.

(Those two findings could be related, too: Since women’s sleep is less efficient, they have to spend more time in bed.)

Old vs. young

Getting older also affects your sleep. In this graph from Fitbit’s sleep study, you can see that we get less deep sleep as we age. When you’re 20, you’re getting half an hour more deep sleep a night than when you’re 70.

We get less and less of the good sleep as we age.

North vs. South

Yes, it’s true: Northerners go to bed five minutes earlier than Southerners. They wake up earlier, too.

That may seem like a very small difference, but on the scale of billions of data points, it’s significant.

On the other hand, Heneghan points out that statistics can be tricky. “I think North/South may be an artificial divide; urban/rural is probably a more meaningful divide,” he notes. In other words, there may just be more big cities in the North.

East vs. West

East Coasters, according to the data, stay up seven minutes later than West Coasters (and wake up five minutes later, too).

“I personally find this consistent with my experience of American culture,” Heneghan says. “I lived in New York. I lived in California. You get to 9 p.m. here in California, and the restaurant staff are kind of looking at you funny. There’s a great quote from Yogi Berra: ‘It gets late real early around here.’”

The national bedtime

Here’s a data point that no amount of sleep-lab studies could have unearthed: The average American goes to bed at 11:21 p.m.

Bedtime consistency

The biggest finding in Fitbit’s data may be the link between sleep quality and bedtime consistency.

That, Gleichauf explains, “is this idea that your bedtime varies.”

And in America, it really does vary — by an average of 64 minutes. You might go to bed at 11 p.m. on weeknights, but stay up after midnight on the weekends.

The Fitbit data shows that your sleep suffers as a result. If your bedtime varies by two hours over the week, you’ll average half hour of sleep a night lessthan someone whose bedtime varies by only 30 minutes.

And you’ll pay the price.

By the time your weekly bedtime variation is 2 hours, it’s costing you half an hour of sleep a night.

You know how jet lag works, right? “When you have jet lag, it’s the mismatch between the actual time, in the zone you’re in, and your circadian rhythm,” Gleichauf told me. “You’re not on the right part of that curve to make you fall asleep.” So, at night in your new city, you lie there for hours, unable to fall asleep — and then in the middle of the next day, you’re overcome by exhaustion.

When your bedtime varies over the week, then, you’re creating self-induced jet lag. Gleichauf calls it social jet lag: On Monday, when you have to go back to work (and drag your bedtime backward), you feel crummy and you’re more likely to get sick.

(Dr. Till Roenneberg, professor at the Institute of Medical Psychology at the University of Munich, calculates that every hour of social jetlag increases your risk of being overweight or obese by about 33%.)

“I’m super excited about this data,” Heneghan says. “For the first time ever, we were actually able to show the link between consistency and how long you sleep.”

Social jet lag, by city

Gleichauf dove into American geography to see if there were differences in bedtime consistency — and there is.

Can you guess which city has the most widely varying bedtimes over the week?

It’s Boston — probably because it’s a huge college town, with a huge population of young people.

Congratulations, Boston—you have the most erratic bedtimes in the country.

Can you guess which one has the least variation in bedtimes?

It’s Las Vegas. “People who live and work in Las Vegas — if they’re in the industry of nightclubs and casinos, their schedule is going to be much less weekend-dominated,” Heneghan says.

Wake-up times also vary. This time, Seattle is the winner, with the least variation across the week. The losers here are New Yorkers, whose wake-up times swing an average of 73 minutes over the week. (Well, it is the city that never sleeps.)

New York is the city that never wakes up consistently.

The takeaways

The reporting that Fitbit’s sleep scientists offer in this exploration is only the very, very beginning. The company has amassed big data — big sleep data — that could provide some incredible answers. We just have to ask the right questions.

Why do men and women sleep differently? Why do we get less deep sleep as we age? Beyond the “party on the weekend” effect, why do our bedtimes vary so much? We know that exercise is good for our sleep, but when should we exercise for the best sleep? When should we eat if we want to get the most deepest sleep? Is the kind of sleep (REM sleep, deep sleep) more important than the total time asleep? Should the nation’s school hours and work hours be adjusted to fit the way we actually sleep?

Fortunately, Fitbit plans to share its data, both with other scientific institutions and in science journals; it’s thrilling to think of the new knowledge that may result from it.

Until then, consider trying to get to bed at a more consistent hour throughout the week. You’ll sleep better, you’ll sleep longer, and you’ll feel better once you’re up.

Or just move to Las Vegas.

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s [email protected]. You can sign up to get his stuff by email.  

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