Getting a new Fitbit is an interesting experience with a steep learning curve. Here’s how it worked for me. I bought a Charge 4, which is in the $200 range. A rather expensive toy, but it was my birthday, and I was suffering from Covid Fatigue. Well, it did take care of my boredom for a few days.
The first thing you have to learn is how to turn it on. Took me two hours. Usually, this stuff comes with a charge, but mine seemed completely dead. You’re supposed to plug it into the charging cord and then follow the instructions that show up. I got no instructions, only a brand-name screen that did nothing. I went online, and none of the instructions I could find there so much as mentioned this intro screen. I downloaded the app, registered, jumped through all the hoops, but still nothing on the watch face.
Helpline Advice
One person said, “Hold the button down for 8 seconds to reset the Fitbit. You’ll know because you’ll get a smiley face.” Well, after a while, I found the button. Held it down for a slow count of 8. The damned thing kept buzzing intermittently. Nothing happened.
Finally, I just left it to charge for several hours. Still no luck. Tried the reset again. Got the smiley face this time. Progress!
Then nothing. Half the time I tried I got the Smiley, half the time the intro logo. Grrr.
Back to the online helpline. Somebody said, “Hold the button down for 10 seconds.” I mucked around with that for an hour or so. No luck. Went back to the 8-second reset. Now I’ve got nothing at all. One step ahead, two steps back.
Left it to charge while I went back online. Next advice: hold the button for 15 seconds. Okay, by now I’m ready to face north at the full moon and toss salt over my shoulder. Anything that might work.
Presto. It worked, and without lunar assistance. So I set it all up, did a walk around the neighbourhood, recorded it with the GPS. All is well.
Battery Life? Advertised at 4 – 6 Days
So the next day I go out for a hike in the North Shore mountains. Set up the GPS to record “Outdoor Exercise.” Halfway through the hike the darn thing starts buzzing. “Can’t access signal.” Two hours into the hike it went blank. Dead battery? Short circuit? So, home I go, cursing. Once it was charged again, I got my GPS record. Half the hike recorded. How useful.
Back to the helpline, to read a torrent of complaints about two-hour battery life. Sifted through the chaff for a while and got the definitive answer. “The only way to get the advertised battery life is to turn off all the bells and whistles you bought this version for.”
So I did. I turned off everything I could, and presto! 4-day battery life. Best lesson: leave everything turned off, and just turn on what you’re using at the moment. Bit of a hassle, but there you have it.
Since then, I’ve been trying various functions.
GPS
The GPS function on the Charge 4 has superb accuracy and limited usefulness. Look at the image below. I was out walking my dog this morning and had to backtrack to a garbage can. When I continued my walk, I took a path on the outside of the fence, exactly 3 metres from my first path. As you can see, there’s one point where the two tracks seem to overlap, which means the GPS wavered 3 metres in accuracy. Which is pretty darn good, when you think about it.
The functional problem with it though, is that as far as I can figure out, you can only dump the GPS map into your phone and look at it when you end the recording session. So you can’t use it to keep track of where you’ve been for navigation purposes. Great for bragging on social media, though. You can post the map straight from your phone.
Sleep
As I suspected, Fitbit gives all sorts of information about your sleep without any idea what to do with it. The most useless piece of data is the “Sleep Score,” which is some kind of amalgamation of your sleep data that tells you whether you had a good sleep or not. Like the other night, I got a score of 55, which is “poor.” Believe me, when I woke up in the morning I knew that already.
It also doesn’t take into account the fact that I’m a restless sleeper. Most nights it doesn’t think I even fell asleep until 4 am. It gives a running record of three levels of sleep: “Light sleep” (I do a lot of that) “REM sleep,” (less than I expected) and “deep sleep,” which apparently I get between 6:30 and 8:30 in the morning. Thus proving what I’ve known all along. Getting up early is stupid. Worth the price of the watch, come to think of it.
Heart Rate
It is handy to know your heartbeat when you’re exercising. The watch face I’ve chosen shows it all the time. My resting heartbeat is around 50, which I gather is good. My highest rate when I’m exercising hard has so far been 140. What does that mean? Well, the Mayo clinic says subtract your age from 220, and that number should be your maximum heartbeat. Good to know. That’s one ancillary benefit to the Fitbit. It gets you looking things up and finding out more about your health.
Distance Travelled…Sort of
And of course, we must discuss accuracy. My Fitbit records both the number of steps and distance travelled. For example, today I’ve done 8,500 steps and gone 5.4 km. Of course the health monitor on my iPhone says I’ve done 7,700 steps and gone 5.8 km. Well, they’re both in the same ballpark, I guess.
Bottom line on this kind of data is that it doesn’t matter how accurate it is because it’s not like you’re in a competition against anyone but yourself. You really want to know how you’re doing relative to the other days of the week, and last month, and last year, recorded on the same device. I’ll have to accumulate some more data before I get anything useful from that.
And for the OCD Among Us
There are also places to record every drink of water and every morsel of food you ingest. It also tells you how many calories you have burned (see info on accuracy above) I have no idea what anyone would want to do with that sort of information except obsess over it, but I leave that up to individual taste. You can set goals of all sorts and get cute light shows on your watch face when you achieve them (see note about battery life above).
Limitations
There is a cute function that leaves the watch face turned off until you turn your wrist up to look at it, at which time it lights up for a few seconds. However, if you’re an active person, you have to turn this function off to save battery. Mine is set so I have to push the button to get the time.
The main limitation I found is that there is no way to run anything in the background. So, for example, if you’re using the GPS on a hike, you can’t access the time or your heartbeat. Maybe in the future I’ll figure that out.
Bottom Line
This is a fun, if frustrating toy with limited usefulness. Its main function is boosting your awareness of your exercise patterns, their effectiveness and their regularity. I’m happy with the mid-range Charge 4, because the data it produces is extensive enough to be the basis for a more comprehensive lifestyle program.
Other Functions I Have Not Tried
Apparently you can also use it to pay bills, play music, receive message alerts, and several other esoteric functions. Since it has a “swim record” function, I assume it’s waterproof, but I’m looking for written evidence on that one before I dive in.
I am reminded of a Casio digital watch I bought once that you could enter telephone numbers into. It was too much hassle, and unless the light was perfect, you couldn’t read them. Cute bells and whistles that you never use are great price inflators.