Shoot Up or Put Up

Not a Maserati GranTurismo. Oh no.

I recently got my hands on Accu-Chek’s newish Compact Plus GT and took it out for a test drive. The “test drive” thing is relatively apt as, for some reason, Accu-Chek have added the suffix “GT” to the meter’s name. I always understood that GT referred to cars and stood for Grand Tourer (or Gran Turismo if you want to go for the Italian – like the Maserati GranTurismo – which is still high on my Christmas wish list). Unfortunately, if the Compact Plus GT were a car it would be big clunky ugly minibus and not the sprightly Maserati above.

The Compact Plus GT is designed to be an all-in-one meter – with finger pricker, test strips and said meter all rolled into one. The meter element isn’t particularly exciting in itself; it has all the features you’ve come to know and love on any modern meter – a 500 test memory, a pretty straightforward user interface and a bright display for night-time use.

Of slightly greater interest is the relatively innovative test strip drum. Rather than sticking in a strip every time you want to test, you put a drum of 17 tiny strips into the machine in one go. A handy dial round the back of the meter tells you how many strips you have left in the meter and the drum incorporates a bar code which automatically calibrates each new set of strips. A switch on the front of the meter then spits out a test strip whenever one is needed. The strips themselves are tiny, very slurpy but require a positively vampiric sample size of 1.5 µL. The attached finger pricker uses an air-pump instead of the usual spring to fire the lancet into your finger. But, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve not noticed any difference between this and a normal finger pricker. Buy, hey, ten out of ten for effort in trying to reduce wear and tear on our ravaged, pepper pot fingers.

All in all, the Compact Plus is made up of some good components – the meter’s okay (but nothing world-shattering), the finger pricker is acceptable and the strip system is very good. However, combined, they form a pretty ugly, clunky bit of kit; which doesn’t take up any less space than my usual meter and assorted kit and just doesn’t really offer anything greater than I have already.

Some people might like the all-in-one nature of the Compact Plus which makes it very easy to grab and shove in a bag as you leave the house; but sadly I just don’t think the sum of the parts makes it a better system than anything else out there. Pity really.

So, in summary:

Sample size – 1/5
1.5 µL – vampiric

Test time – 2/5
Five seconds – not wildly quick, but not disastrous

Test strip calibration – 5/5
No calibration by user required

Test strip slurpiness – 4/5
Pretty damned slurpy!

Memory – 4/5
500 readings – which isn’t too bad

Sexiness – 1/5
I would say it’s an ugly duckling; but “duckling” implies small and cute.

Beeping – 5/5
Can be turned off. Thankfully.

4am test – 3/5
Bright, easy to read display makes it a bearable meter at 4am. But no light on the test strip – boo!

TOTAL – 25/40

Check out our other blood glucose meter reviews or have a look at the manufacturer’s web site.

Not shagging other meters

Lifescan’s OneTouch Ultra2 is my current meter of choice and I don’t really know why.

Like a long-term relationship between partners who don’t love each any more, yet can’t be bothered to go to the effort of breaking up, I’m almost completely ambivalent about it. My Ultra2 isn’t really too bad, certainly isn’t abusive and hasn’t been sleeping around with other meters, so I just trundle along with it every day. There’s just no need to get another meter.

On paper at least the Ultra2 is perfectly fine, at 5ul the sample size is okay, but not exactly market-leading. The test time of five seconds is bearable but, again, nothing spectacular. It has a back-light, the colour of which – through lots of association – I instantly associate with night-time hypos (very odd that – a colour being associated with a physiological action; I guess it’s like ersatz synesthesia . Possibly.)

Anyhoo, it’s quite nice to look at, is relatively small and is pretty simple to use. The infernal beeping can be turned off and it does pass the 4am hypo test pretty well. It’s got a pretty big memory for your readings and can be hooked up to the obligatory PC software for further analysis, which is nice, but something even I (as a dedicated computer geek) can never, ever be bothered to do.

So there we have it – the Ultra2 is a perfectly fine meter, it’ll never set the world alight but it does what it’s supposed to.

However, having written this review, I’ve realised it’s a relationship I no longer want to be in, so as soon as I’ve updated my prescription I’m leaving the Ultra2 forever and running off with the sexy, young thing that is the Abott Freestyle Lite – wish me luck!

Sample size – 3/5
0.5μL – fine, I guess.

Test time – 2/5
5 seconds – meh.

Test strip calibration – 0/5
Nope, no automatic calibration

Test strip slurpiness – 5/5
Equal with the best on the market

Memory – 4/5
500 readings – not too shabby

Sexiness – 3/5
A little plain-Jane but bearable

Beeping – 5/5
Can be turned off

4am test – 3/5
No worse than any other meter without a test strip light

Total – 30/40

Check out the manufacturer’s web site or read about our reviews.

Horrible, nasty, plastic, vile, repulsive, tacky

Much like a Russian bride I once tried to buy via the Intermaweb, on paper the Menarini GlucoMen LX looks great. But also much like Irena (the aforementioned Russian bride) the reality is just not like the description.

Shortly after Irena arrived in the United Kingdom I noticed that unlike her cheerful smiling pictures I saw on the seedy web site on which I found her, she wasn’t in fact very smiley in person at all. Rather sullen in fact. With a penchant for hitting the vodka. Before breakfast.

Although I tried my best, sadly I had to end things with Irena after I took her to meet my parents. She spent the whole of Sunday lunch swearing, trying to kick the dog (referring to our elderly King Charles Spaniel as “that bloddy Siberian devil”) and – finally – puking a foul-smelling vodka and chicken mix into mum’s pot-porri. Last time I heard Irena had returned to Moscow, where she eventually married a local Mafia boss and was happily settling into the life of a gangster’s moll. Good luck to her!

And it was much the same with the GlucoMen LX (no, really). On paper it does look good. A small sample size, test strips which didn’t need to be calibrated and a fairly good 400 test memory. However, it just looks and feels utterly horrible. Encased in semi-see-through plastic (much like Irena when she was feeling “cекси”, as she put it) the GlucoMen looks tacky and just feels like it will fall apart the minute you breathe on it a little too heavily.

Such poor looks would be forgiveable if the meter had a range of mind-bogglingly useful features. But, perhaps needless to say, it doesn’t. It has the usual range of average results analysis and so on but while the layout and navigation is pretty straightforward it just doesn’t feel particularly intuitive or particularly nice to use.

When there are a multitude of sexier meters out there (in fact, every other glucose meter, ever) there is absolutely no reason to saddle yourself with this vile piece of design. However, if forced upon you by a particularly cruel diabetic clinic or evil insurance company it’ll just about do.

So, top tip for the day – never expect things to be as good as described on the web. Especially if you’re checking out Russian brides.

Sample size – 4/5
0.3μL per sample – pretty good

Test time – 3/5
4 seconds – quick, but not the quickest

Test strip calibration – 5/5
No need to calibrate. Yay!

Test strip slurpiness – 3/5
Averagely fine.

Memory – 3/5
400 records – not bad, not bad.

Sexiness – -5/5
Scores minus points for its utter hideousness

Beeping – 5/5
Can be turned off.

4am test – 2/5
Not great, but not entirely a disaster either.

Grand total – 20/40

Check out our other blood glucose meter reviews or go to the manufacturer’s site

The Freestyle Lite - with a really rubbish reading

While this tragic world of ours is filled every day with calamity, conflict and catastrophe there are perhaps a few rays of sunshine that poke through the heavy gloom, which give us something to live for and stop us from bashing our owns heads in with a handy paperweight.

My personal happiness list includes waking up next to my wife (ahhh!); roast chicken and the guitar solo from Iron Maiden’s Hallowed by thy Name. With these three things in place I’m sorted and life is good.

But now, having used Abbott’s Freestyle Lite blood glucose meter for the best part of a week, there is now another bright ray of sunlight in the gloomy slough of despond that is diabetes – as it is, in fact, a bloody good meter.

First impressions of the Freestyle are great – it’s absolutely tiny, sleek and looks pretty cool. If only it’d had been in black rather than utilitarian blue it would have scored full marks on the sexiness scale, but we can live with it.

The sample size is a tiny 0.3μL but this is slightly let down by the longish testing time of five seconds – if it had been 3 seconds I would have been ecstatic (well, perhaps not ecstatic exactly – it is only a meter after all and everything’s relative).

Speaking of the test strips, they’re a bit odd. Rather than sucking up your bloody gore through the bottom of the strip as with pretty much every other meter out there, you aim your finger at the side of the strip instead. Once you’ve worked this out (of course, I never read the manual and so it took me a while) the strips are just as good as any other with pretty good “slurpiness”.

The only slight downside with the Freestyle’s strips are that you don’t actually get to see your blood being sucked in – it’s all hidden away under a black section of strip. I find seeing your life-blood being drawn in is useful feedback to ensure you’re actually doing things correctly.

However the strips do have a great, great feature which more than compensates for this minor gripe. As you know, with most strips and meters, if you don’t put enough blood on the strip the meter will churn away as usual and then display an error message asking you to repeat the test. Nothing is more infuriating – after you’ve struggled to get a tiny drop of blood out of stone-cold fingers – than the meter moodily rejecting your sacrificial blood offering. But with the Freestyle Lite, if the meter detects you haven’t put enough blood on it lets you know and gives you another 60 seconds to squeeze another drop out. This is intensely good – it saves a tonne of frustration and stops you wasting test strips, which I guess is a boon if you actually have to pay for them (God bless the NHS!)

The Freestyle Lite has all the usual meter accoutrements – averages over 7, 14 and 30 days; it can be plugged into a PC to produce fancy graphs and the irritating beep can thankfully be turned off.

But I’ve left the best for last – this is the first meter I’ve tested that actually passes the 4am hypo test because – wait for it – it has an internal LED that lights up the test strip! Halle-bloody-luiah! This simple addition allows you actually see where your blood is on your finger, instead of having to randomly stab the test strip around in the pitch dark. Once you’ve successfully sucked up enough blood the meter automatically turns off the strip light and turns on the meter backlight. Bloomin’ marvellous! Why this isn’t a feature on lots of other meters I don’t know, it’s just so handy.

So all in all Abbott’s Freestyle Lite is a very good, sexy, well thought out meter – so much so that once I’ve got my prescription sorted out it’s becoming my regular every-day meter; so this particular ray of sunshine is sticking around!

Sample size - 5/5
0.3μL

Test time – 3/5
5 seconds

Test strip calibration – 5/5
No coding required.

Test strip slurpiness – 4/5
Very good, but not seeing blood being sucked in is disconcerting

Memory - 3/5
400 results – enough to be going on with

Sexiness – 4/5
Petite and cool looking – though if it was black it would be cooler!

Beeping 5/5
Beeping can be turned off

4am test – 5/5
With a lit up strip and automatic backlight it’s the acme of meters when faced with a 4am hypo.

Grand total: 34/40

Read about our reviews, or check out the manufacturer’s web site.

Yawn!

Boredom comes in many flavours. Waiting for trains that have been delayed yet again by damp leaves or suicidal cows on the line are boring. Watching the end of documentary on geese farming in Essex while you wait for that new comedy to come on the TV is boring. Impatiently waiting your turn in a dank, dripping, seedy Bangkok bordello is boring.

But with the new Bayer Contour blood glucose meter I’ve found a brand new flavour of boring.

Up front the Contour is a perfectly fine meter – it tests your blood and spits out a result, which is I guess what we’re all after in a meter; but the Contour seems to do it without the slightest interesting feature to raise it up above the morass of other meters currently available on the market that fight for the attention of the pancreatically-challenged populace.

Looks-wise Contour is okay, it’s certainly not as sexy as the funky Nano, but it’ll do. I guess. It’s similar in a way to those Toyota Corollas which come in that hideous watery light-blue that seem to be driven exclusively by old age pensioners. It’s not entirely offensive to the eye but it hardly sets the world on fire with an eruption of thrilling colour and design.

In terms of features, the Contour has everything you would expect from a modern meter. On the plus side, it has a reasonable memory for your results and it doesn’t need to be calibrated with each new set of strips which is always a welcome addition.

On the minus side at 0.6μL the Contour needs quite a large sample size which is a bad thing as I prefer to keep my blood in me rather than smeared all over multitudinous test strips. The test time of five seconds is also relatively sluggish but just about acceptable.

Perhaps a redeeming feature is that the Contour can be used in two modes – what I like to call “Idiot Mode” and “Clever Mode”. Idiot Mode does nothing but take your blood and spew out a reading which I suppose is handy if you can’t be bothered faffing about with extra features and functions. However, the “Clever Mode” where you can turn on pre and post meal markers and note unusual readings isn’t really all that clever in that these are functions common to pretty much every meter out there; but at least you have the option to turn them off. Clever Mode also includes an alarm which can remind you to do a test after a meal – again mildly handy for the negligent diabetic.

The Contour generally performs as well as any other meter when it comes to using it in the pitch dark – in other words not very well, meaning you have to turn on the bedside light and wake up your slumbering wife – though I did find the smooth buttons harder than some to use.

So all in all, the Contour is certainly not a bad meter – it does most things reasonably well – but with other meters out there that offer so much more this meter’s going to be confined to the boring bottom of my boring spares drawer.

Sample size - 2/5
0.6µL, hmm somewhat vampiric

Test time - 3/5
5 seconds – slightly sluggish, but acceptable

Test strip calibration - 5/5
No calibration needed. Yay!

Test strip slurpiness - 4/5
Yum, nice n’slurpy

Memory - 4/5
500 readings

Sexiness - 2/5
Dull as a train spotter at Reading station

Beeping - 5/5
Can thankfully be turned off

4am test - 2/5
Smooth buttons difficult to find in pitch darkness, backlight is fine but no light on the test strip

Grand total – 27/40

Read about our blood glucose meter reviews or check out the manufacturer’s web site.

The Nano and a reflected Tim

Along with being potty-trained, you learn disappointment at an early age. I remember when I was delightful young nipper (I was young once, honest) waiting in giddy anticipation for Christmas Day. Being small I didn’t give a flying damn about the togetherness of family, I was sleeplessly waiting for Father Christmas to deliver the latest LEGO airport model.

As you all know, the LEGO airport was the epitome of cool for the 1980’s small boy. It came with a full terminal building, landing lights, air traffic control – the works. The mere thought sends the hair up on the back of my neck even now.

However, as I ripped off the wrapping paper I uncovered a LEGO digger. My heart sunk, it was pretty damned cool but it just wasn’t the airport I wanted. For the first time ever my tiny frame encountered the terrible feeling of disappointment.

Forward-wind 25 years and one failed-pancreas later and that feeling re-occurred as I spent a week testing the Roche Accu-Chek Aviva Nano. I ordered my Aviva Nano via the Intermaweb and was, again, giddy with anticipation. Here was a meter that looked and sounded cool. Shiny and black like Michael Knight’s KITT car, but without the cheesy wise-cracks and flaky plotlines.

I unwrapped the box and was delighted. Delighted, that is, until I put a test strip in. The test strips work well enough but they look seriously clunky and ugly compared to the Aviva Nano itself. It was like a country yokel with straw in his hair attending an Ambassador’s ball. In this case the test strip was the yokel and the meter the dinner-suited posho sneering at the unwelcome guest.

Getting down to actual business I did actually like the Aviva Nano an awful lot. First off it’s utterly tiny and should really carry a warning about accidental swallowing it’s so petite. The three buttons are hidden round the sides and top of the meter giving a nice, sleek minimalist look to the device.

While it doesn’t have a backlight, the figures on the screen glow with a cool, slightly eerie blue which is easy enough to see in the dark for your unscheduled 4am hypo. The buttons I liked a moment ago can be difficult to find in the dark but it’s certainly no worse than any other meter. Needless to say, the Holy Grail of a meter that lights up the strip itself doesn’t happen here (will it ever, I wonder?)

The Aviva Nano has a reasonable memory and can display your averages over the last 30 days or so but doesn’t do anything more fancy like drawing graphs, etc., not that graphs are all that useful.

Results can be marked as pre-food or after-food using a cute apple icon and the meter can be set to beep to automatically remind you to test one or two hours after a meal; alarms can also be set for particular times which is surely a boon for the forgetful or negligent. These alarms are actually relatively useful and a moderately innovative idea. It seems Roche have actually put a reasonable amount of thought into what might be useful for the diabetic-on-the-Clapham-omnibus instead of churning out another meter with the same features as every other one on the market. Good for Roche.

After a week’s testing, I liked the Aviva Nano – it’s a small, neat, relatively sexy meter – if only they could do something about the clunky test strips it could become my regular every day meter. And you can’t get better than that!

So, finally, in summary:

Sample size > 2/5
0.6μL – quite a large sample in these modern times. Boo!

Test time > 3/5
5 seconds. Mmmm, okay I suppose. Nothing special.

Test strip calibration > 2/5
Yes, each batch needs to be calibrated. Boo!

Test strip slurpiness > 4/5
Very good, but yokel-styling raises a grimace each and every time you use one.

Memory > 3/5
500 tests

Sexiness > 4.5/5
Oh baby; sleek, petite and sexy with funky lighting. Pity about the vile test strips.

Beeping > 5/5
Can be turned off, yay! But can also beep usefully at you to remind you to test if required.

4am test > 3/5
Glow in the dark figures are nice, buttons can be fiddly in the pitch dark.

Total > 26.5/40

Read about our blood glucose meter reviews.

The teeny-tiny UltraEasy

Received opinion says that good things come in small packages.

This is clearly not true, I can think of loads of things that come in small packages which are simultaneously small and completely rubbish.

Chief amongst these would be a certain ex-girlfriend of mine who was somewhat height-challenged. She was a small package but she most certainly was not good. Think of a ball of seething, dwarfish spite and misery. A hateful being who sapped the joy out of every situation whatever the circumstances. An absolute delight in other words.

Other small things that leap to mind are wasps (hateful little bastards), midges (a source of misery for me and my apparently oh-so-tasty flesh) and jockeys (nasty people who whip horses – the best of all the animals).

So it was with unmitigated surprise that I actually quite liked LifeScan’s teeny-weeny OneTouch UltraEasy blood glucose meter.

In terms of features, it doesn’t really do all that much. Essentially, it sucks your blood and spits out a blood glucose reading. It doesn’t come with the usual useless back-light, but it can give you average readings over a few weeks or so, which is quite handy when you want to be smug about how good your averages are.

The main feature, attribute and benefit for the LifeScan OneTouch UltraEasy (do they not believe in spaces between words?) is therefore its size. It’s very, very small and so can be easily concealed; much like the hidden handgun and swordstick you carry to guard yourself against ambush by rival cartels. So that’s handy.

Not being the leader of an international drug gang (mores the pity) I actually keep my UltraEasy in my cycling backpack, which I keep constantly ready with a meter and a stock of sweets and Lucozade, etc. Just in case I want to sit in the garage looking at my bike. In a deckchair. With a glass of wine.

The meter uses LifeScan’s standard test strips, which require a fairly small sample and suck up your precious life-gore very easily. The finger-pricking device is small, looks quite funky and is also nice and compact.

But it gets better – the UltraEasy comes in different colours! You might think I’m being sarcastic (for once) but this is actually quite a good feature. I test my blood glucose four, five or six times a day and, frankly, I get bored to tears looking at the same meter over and over again. That’s probably why I use so many meters – sheer, unadulterated boredom.

While you can get the UltraEasy in standard primary colours, I think there would be a huge market for clip-on fascias for all meters – just like you get for mobile phones. So sign me up for a Union Jack cover for mine! Oh yeah, baby!

So in summary:

Sample size > 3/5
1.0μL

Test time > 3/5
5 seconds

Test strip calibration > 2/5
Yes, it’s required with each batch

Test strip slurpiness > 4/5
Very good

Memory > 3/5
500 tests

Sexiness > 4/5
Small and sleek

Beeping > 5/5
Yes, can be turned off

4am test > 2/5
No backlight

Grand total: 26/40

Read about our tests and criteria.

The quite good Jazz

I hate jazz and any right-thinking person who isn’t confined to an asylum is the same.

In actual fact, I used to quite like some types of jazz – a little bit of Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden or the explosive madness of Count Basie would be just lovely at the right time and in the right place. However all that changed one evening a few years ago.

I was spending some time over at the Islay Jazz Festival and so far everything had gone well. We’d listened to a various mix of bands in a miscellaneous collection of village halls and drafty sheds. Being famous for having eleven (at the time) whisky distilleries our Islay hosts prefixed each performance with a tot of good whisky. This made some of the less accomplished acts somewhat more bearable.

But all that changed with a performance in Bowmore’s famous round church. Sadly I’ve forgotten (or blanked out) the name of the duo in question, but it consisted of a Swedish twosome – one on double bass and one on saxophone – who played a specially composed composition called “Whales” or “Birdsong” or “Complete Boredom” for what seemed like four hours. There would be a trill of saxophone followed by a thrub of double bass, followed by a random cacophony of untold, unending misery. And the musicians (if you can call them that) looked so damned smug all the way through, like they knew it was impenetrable and clever (but unlistenable) and you just weren’t clever enough to get it.

The pews were rock hard and, being a church, we weren’t allowed our usual stiffener of whisky. After the second hour I thought I had died and had been placed in once of Dante’s rings of Hell specially created for those who had been particularly bad (leaving toast crumbs in the butter, etc.) And it was only by repeatedly and painfully punching myself on the leg and knocking my head on the pew in front that I was able to survive the ordeal.

So, as you can probably now imagine, it was with some trepidation that I received my new Wavesense Jazz blood glucose testing meter in the post.

The meter itself is small, compact and is pretty straightforward to use, having up, down and “do” buttons. It has quite a useful backlight (but nothing to light up the test strip itself – surely the Holy Grail of night-time meter usage) and a plethora of graphs and statistics about your glucose management.

The Wavesense Jazz also comes with alarms that can flash and buzz if you are hyper or hypo. Though I would have thought the readout displaying a result of 2.3 or 17.4 in big numbers would be have been enough notice for the average user, but the alarms might be useful for the moronic.

The meter allows you to tag results as being before breakfast, after breakfast and so on to allow you to track your blog glucose compared to mealtimes which is a mildly useful feature. However, from the meter itself you can’t adjust what time it thinks breakfast, lunch or dinner should be and to my tastes they were far too early. Dinner at 6pm? Pfft, I haven’t even begun to start my nightly Bacchanalian feasts of port and pheasant by then. I suspect these timings will be adjustable via the computer software that will come with the meter (once it has been approved) but even so it would be nice to adjust these things via the meter.

The Jazz also allowed me to try out Wavesense’s test strips for the first time. And by crikey I like ‘em. Handily they can only slot into the meter one way, useful in low-light conditions (such as in an opium den or crack house) and they soak up the teeny-tiny amount of gory blood required in a jiffy. Processing is quick (though perhaps not as quick as the “1-2-3″ advertised) and the lancet firing device looks cool and works as well as any.

Of least use is the positive feedback mechanism which gives you a little smiley-face icon if your latest reading is within acceptable limits. As much use as a gelignite suppository, this icon will only be of practical help to drooling morons, but its cheery countenance when I get things right does help me to block out the nightmare of that hideous night in Bowmore.

Sample size – 3/5
0.5μL – fairly large but acceptable

Test time – 4/5
3 seconds – though oddly seems longer

Test strip calibration – 5/5
Self-calibrating – yay!

Test strip slurpiness – 4/5
Nice ‘n’ slurpy

Memory – 5/5
1,865 results – a memory like an elephant

Sexiness – 4/5
Not bad, nice sexy screen

Beeping – 5/5
Can be turned off, thank heavens

4am test – 3/5
Nice bright backlight is helpful.

Grand total – 33/40

Read about our reviews here.

Not just smart - UltraSmart

Some of my friends (and they are few and far between) are sometimes kind enough to say I’m slightly smart. I know a bit about physics (though it’s very limited) and I occasionally read some fancy books that were written over fifty years ago. You may think this all just false modesty and actually I’m wildly clever, but no – it’s not – it’s real modesty.

Anyway, it’s very kind thing of my friends to say such things and I’m very pleased to have reached the dizzy heights of “slightly smart” amongst my peers and loved ones.

So when I first laid my hands upon Lifescan’s OneTouch UltraSmart I was beside myself with anticipation. How good would something have to be if it was not only slightly smart (like me), not only smart, not only very smart but actually ultra smart? My mind boggled.

Could it do difficult things like hard sums, change your energy supplier or work out what you’ve done to upset your wife this time? I knew that since Banting’s discovery and isolation of insulin eighty years ago the field of diabetes research has come on in bounds and leaps; but could such a small meter promise so much?

No, not really. The OneTouch Ultra Smart is pretty much the same as any other blood glucose meter, except it offers a few more bits and pieces. Chief amongst these is the claim that it is proven to reduce your A1C (essentially your average blood glucose over three months). Having read too much of Ben Goldacre’s wonderfully insightful and somewhat cynical blog over at www.badscience.net which includes hideous facts about dodgy scientific trials I immediately thought “cobblers”.

But I was slightly surprised and slightly delighted to see in the fine print down at the bottom of their website the details of just how they had performed their tests to come to this supposition. Lovely! Anyway, having read all the guff I came to the conclusion that it didn’t make a wild difference either way, with perhaps a gnat’s whisker in favour of the UltraSmart.

So anyway, how is it to use?

Not bad really, the test strips are Lifescan’s standard strips which are used over most of their range. So in summary they’re blue, they need to be coded with each new tub, they suck up your lifeblood very quickly and they process the results in five seconds. So far so wonderful.

The screen is easy to read and it comes with most of the usual meter features. So the main benefit of the UltraSmart over other meters has to be the plethora of graphs and statistics it can churn out for you at the press of a button. Most of time I didn’t use these graphs, but on occasions when my blood glucose went all out of goose they were very
handy in trying to track down what the problem might be. All this without have to hook it into the computer and use the obligatory management software that comes with most new meters.

On the flip side the massive brain that it needs to create the graphs does mean this is a slightly bigger and bulkier meter than most. But given you’re a diabetic and you lug a tonne of stuff everywhere you go this is hardly the end of the world. Even smart old Einstein could work that out.

Sample size – 3/5
1.0μL – small, but not small enough

Test time – 3/5
5 seconds; meh, okay

Test strip calibration – 1/5
Bah, they need to be calibrated

Test strip slurpiness – 4/5
Pretty good

Memory – 5/5
Above average 90 days of readings

Sexiness – 3/5
It looks a bit clunky compared to other meters, but on-screen graphs look cool

Beeping – 5/5
Can be turned off

4am test – 3/5
Fairly useful backlight is helpful

Grand total – 27/40

About our reviews

Think back to the wonderful day you were diagnosed with Type One. Ah, what lovely memories. The smell of hospital detergent, the sinking feeling in your belly as you realised with a chill that your life would never be the same, the caring but slightly detached consultant; wondering what the hell diabetes was and how long you had to live. Happy days.

After the initial shock you would – hopefully – be given a crash-course to teach you how to stand in for your pancreas, now that the stupid bloody thing had decide to conk out on you.

Weighted down with leaflets about driving with diabetes, drinking with diabetes, eating with diabetes and booklets detailing the thrills and spills of peripheral neuropathy you would have probably be issued with one of these little beauties, the ubiquitous Optium Xceed.

The Optium Xceed is the AK47 assault rifle of the blood-glucose meter world. Simple to use, common as manure from a Friesian cow called Smith, known all the world round and standard issue to the newly-diagnosed.

The less geeky and gadget-obsessed may still have one of these things in everyday use; the rest of us having moved on to something slightly more sophisticated. I certainly have. In fact I probably change my meter more frequently than a cholera victim changes his underwear.

However I still have a soft-spot for the Optium Xceed. I don’t know whether it’s because of Abbott’s cute assertion that this is only meter on the market that can check your ketones.

Now, I don’t know whether I’m a negligent diabetic or something but I never, ever, ever, ever check my ketones. I know I’m diabetic (obviously), I know sometimes my blood glucose goes high (obviously) and I know that, as sure as day follows breakfast, that I will sometimes produce ketones when I’m high. I don’t really need a meter to
tell me something so strikingly obvious.

Though saying that, I do own a Oregon weather station that tells me it’s raining outside (it does a lot of that in Scotland) when I could simply look out of the window. I didn’t need that meter to tell me that but I still have it. So maybe, the whole ketone measuring thing does have a place after all. Or maybe they’re just pandering to the lunatics who adhere to the late, lamentable Atkins’ diet; who calculate the diet isn’t working unless they’re producing ketones. Nutters.

Anyway, I saw this model on an episode of BBC’s Casualty when they had some poor bloke falling into a diabetic coma, or something, on an episode. I nudged my wife excitedly, “I’ve got one of them!” So for that reason alone it deserves to remain in the drawer with some out of date test strips for emergency use.

So to summarise:

Sample size > 5/5
0.3μL

Test time > 3/5
3 seconds

Test strip calibration > 2/5
Yes, each batch needs calibrating

Test strip slurpiness > 2/5
Slightly waterproof compared to other strips

Memory > 2/5
450 tests

Sexiness > 2/5
Too ubiquitous to be sexy – a victim of it’s own success

Beeping > 5/5
Yes, can be turned off

4am test > 3/5
Comes complete with backlight and is relatively straightforward to use

Grand total: 24/40