A Retroactive Watch Review: Two Fitbits

I have used smartwatches for a long time. I got my first, a crappy knock off thing years ago, I couldn’t tell you when. It wasn’t good, but it worked. I still think it a fantastic feat that a virtual QWERTY keyboard on a screen that was probably no more than an inch across made it out the door.

I’ve daily driven an actually respectable smartwatch continuously since 2019, 6 years ago almost exactly, and recently I have noticed that I’ve somehow become quite nerdy about these little things, so I want to take a good look at the watches I’ve used and review them!

This one will cover my two past Fitbits (which I no longer use). In the future I’ll also write about my current daily driver (the Huawei Watch GT 3), and when I get the Core Time 2 I have pre-ordered, you bet I’ll have thoughts on it - hopefully this December? Certainly I’m looking forward to reading reviews of the Core 2 Duo when it ships!

Fitbit Charge HR

I had this thing from early May 2019 up to December 2020.

As a watch I found it relatively competent - the display is very small, black and white, and has large pixels, but I found it to still be actually pretty gorgeous. It’s an OLED display, the software manages to make the pixels feel tasteful and not a limitation, and I had no issue finding a watch face I liked or navigating the software.

It only supports digital faces due to its tiny screen, and the single button input means that any more complex interactions are going to be happening through the app - be it looking at graphs, setting up your alarms, choosing your watch face, etc. I remember the battery life being pretty good, but not spectacular, but I really do not love the charger port.

I find it to be quite pretty actually, it definitely falls less into looking like a watch and more like a fitness device with its band form factor, and the grid pattern is rather tasteful. I liked the buckle on the band, a stepped design that Fitbit would use again.

The sensors in the back always felt like they pressed into my wrist rather uncomfortably, and being a silicone band, I would get itchy if I wore it too long, or it got sweaty.

It’s difficult to say how accurate or not the data from any of these devices is, but I definitely remember the ‘floors climbed’ stat for stairs always just seeming completely ludicrous on this device.

This device was surprisingly capable of showing you incoming call notifications featuring the caller ID name, but I never used this. You could tell it to start or stop tracking an exercise session on-device (hold the button), but that uses up the extent of the interaction with this thing possible on the one button (a simple press wakes it and cycles through displays), so that’s it.

I don’t think I would ever return to using one of these, but if you’re in it for the data its perfectly competent actually - it will give you the date and time, tell you how well you slept, what your heart rate is like, track your exercise, steps, calories burned, etc.

This device really is reminiscent of the 3-years-prior Fitbit Flex which was basically what you’d get if you chopped the screen and button (and heart rate sensors) out of a Charge! The heart rate monitor added in the HR variant of the Charge reduced the advertised battery life from 7 to 5 days which seems disappointing, but I guess with a small form factor you get a small battery.

At the time it cost $150 and of course I can’t very well make a value judgement based on the state of technology for a product launched when I was, uhhh, 8 years old, but I can say that in October 2014, you could have bought a Pebble Steel for $120 or a Pebble for $99. For this you would get a beautiful 1.26” ‘transflective’ LCD, thousands of applications to run on device, but you would lose out on the health sensors.

Depends on your priorities!

Fitbit Versa 2

I got my Versa 2 in December 2020 and it really felt like it was actually a smartwatch, and not just a slick digital watch with health sensors in it. It has a 1.34” AMOLED display, watch faces (you can build your own!), plenty of apps to install, notifications, etc.

I found the Fitbit OS UI to generally be quite attractive and modern - it very much feels built for the OLED display with its clean thin lines and curved font. It uses colour nicely. It’s quite a modern, flat and timeless look!

I found that it handled receiving notifications quite well - the Fitbit app shows you the list of apps on your phone and you can turn them on and off as you please. A surprising amount were known to the watch enough to show an icon and set the colour used in the UI. It had a notification shade and would show them as toasts over whatever you’re doing. This is in addition to a ‘Quick Settings’ panel similar to that found on mobile operating systems and other wearables.

Being a proper smartwatch you can pretty much configure everything on the device. I liked using it for alarms to wake me up, just the same as on the Charge, and I recall the smart wake function working very well (this would sound the alarm early if you woke up naturally close to the alarm time).

I do find this watch to be unattractive, as I do for most smartwatches. If you don’t mind your smartwatch looking like a smartwatch then its inoffensive, but it also loses the personality a lot of older Fitbit devices like the surge and blaze had. If your watch face has a black background you probably won’t notice the bezels - this really seems to be a classic trick with OLED smartwatches! The Pixel watch is doing it! Just make your UI be black and people won’t notice the gigantic bezels.

Speaking of the display, this watch has always-on display, which I always loved. The watch face I used at the time had a very good AOD implementation - the face and hands would remain but the stats - what Apple would have called “complications” - would fade out subtly. Very nice, I always liked that.

As someone who finds it easier to read analog clock faces, I like having a square screen with a decent resolution as opposed to the tiny and very wide screen of the Charge HR, as I can have a decent looking analog watch face. The extra space from it being square leaves space for showing additional data, and is great for the smart features, but to be honest I’d have preferred something round.

Many high-profile apps were available, though I never used them at the time. I also never used Fitbit Pay (I was 15 at the time!), but it seems like it was pretty well implemented. I never used Alexa, that was a totally pointless inclusion.

You could however, for some services, reply to notifications with your voice, which is pretty awesome. I never got to try this as I was using iOS at the time, but this is a cool feature, and it’s cool to see that other watches adopted the whole voice input thing the Pebble leaned hard on.

I found the battery life to be kind of mediocre. Like it’s fine but it’s not great. I found it to be uncomfortable to wear, it pressed into my wrist more than the Charge HR did, and the metrics were basically the same as that device.

I’ve heard of people wearing Apple Watches continuously for many days in a row, and I could never dream of doing that with this watch, though it was workable enough to wear through the night and the better part of the day.

This watch has WiFi purely for installing updates - this means you have to pair it to a WiFi network on its own (it’s not P2P with the phone!) when you set it up, but it does allow it to efficiently update itself. Note that despite this apps cannot use WiFi and it will stay off pretty much the entire time, instead using Bluetooth Low Energy to talk to your phone. This is sensible IMO as it allows the rare time you need high throughput to have it, yet keeps power use nice and low.

There is only the one button on this thing to go with the touchscreen which is fine but feels a little stingy to me. This watch also, for some reason, has Alexa on board, and a microphone to match… but no speakers. Excellent.

The Fitbit mobile app kind of sucks big time, but it does work. Many apps on the watch actually came in two parts, a part on the watch, and a part on the phone that it talked to in the background with a separate UI and settings. This is a pragmatic way of doing it and it is how most smartwatch apps do actually work - the phone has network access etc., certainly the Pebble does this for e.g. getting GPS data, and I know my Huawei will go via the phone to fetch weather data for example. It is kinda odd though to have settings for apps in the Fitbit phone app separately that you can interact with, and I have mixed feelings on it. It’s a nice way to do heavy configuration rather than doing it on-watch, but it just somehow felt janky to me.

Writing apps or faces for it felt like of naff - the SDK was pretty annoying to work with, but the tooling they built around it were about as good as you could ask for.

The software was pretty good but I didn’t love the hardware. After about two years and 3 months, the rubber ring that held the loose part of the band down snapped, and since it was out of warranty by then I had to buy a replacement band (at the time I was super jealous of the Apple Watch Milanese Loop so I got a cheap knock off version of that for this watch… it was not great). Another 3 months later (~two and a half years in!), the screen entirely popped off while I was wearing it idly during the day, and to this day it is sat on my shelf with the screen just held on by a ribbon cable.

Honestly, it was pretty competent, and being from a large western manufacturer as Fitbit are is nice, ‘cause current-me would very much like to have Fitbit Pay and it means there are plenty of companies you’ve actually heard of willing to write apps for it, but that said, I wouldn’t buy one now. It’s kind of mediocre.

Maybe I’ll try to repair the screen some day - if later experience is anything to go by these seals do just wear out and you can superglue it back down.

Conclusions

I think it will be more interesting of a comparison when I throw my current watch, a Huawei Watch GT 3 into the ring, as there will be many more like-to-like comparisons to draw then.

This probably isn’t very useful since nobody is buying a 2019 Fitbit anymore, but its fun to look back I figure.

I am very excited to see how the Core Time compares when I get my paws on that, I’ll definitely have fun with that, and hey if I get impatient and get a PineTime to play with or anything like that I’ll have to see how it stacks up :p Thanks for reading! I’ll drop a link to any other watch reviews I write here in future heh. — Hazel