About our reviews

Meters, meters everywhere

While some people review blood glucose meters based on dry technical facts and figures, here at your soaraway Shoot Up or Put Up we compare them both on their basic stats but also on a number of other factors vital to the modern diabetic in a hurry. To skip this guff click here to go straight to the reviews.

In detail, our test categories are as follows:

Sample size
Here at Shoot Up we like our blood and so the less the meter needs for a sample the better.

Test time
We’re busy people, we don’t have time to wait ten or more seconds for a test result dagnabbit – we want results now!

Test strip calibration
Making sure the meter is properly calibrated with your latest batch of test strips is very important; so we like it if the machine does it for you.

Test strip slurpiness
We like test strips that slurp up your live-giving blood with the avidity of a hungry vampire. Test strips that are seemingly waterproof are a no-no. If “slurpiness” wasn’t a word before it certainly is now.

Memory
Seeing a pattern of readings over a week or month is very useful in ironing-out post dinner highs, so the bigger the memory the better.

Sexiness
One of the few benefits of diabetes are the gadgets. Something that looks like it came out of the Ark will be marked down, well-designed tiny iPod-lookalikes will be marked up.

Beeping
It may seem minor, but a monitor that has a beep that can’t be turned off is highly, highly annoying. And embarrassing as you sneakily test your glucose during the quiet part of a funeral.

4am test
Blood glucose meters are often needed at 4am, in the pitch dark while your glucose-starved brain struggles to work. A meter that can cope with this will score well, those that can’t get thrown against the wall in hypoglycaemic rage.

About our tests

As noted in the About Us page, we’re not in the pay of big pharma (unfortunately) so our reviews aren’t (very) biased and are based on actually using the meters as genuine, hard-core Type Ones for a few days.

If you happen to make meters (and we know you all look at the site, we see the IP addresses of your corporate networks on our stats package!) and would like us to have a look at your stuff please drop Tim an email at tim@shootuporputup.co.uk with all the gory details.

The reviews

And finally, all our blood glucose meter reviews can be found here.