#Fitbit alta activity and sleep tracker update
#Fitbit alta activity and sleep tracker full

So the thinking is that you’d wear the Fitbit Surge during your workout, but might switch back to this for the rest of your day. I weighed it in at 29g, versus the Fitbit Charge coming in at 20g:įitbit views this unit as a bit of a complement to the Fitbit Surge for athletes. Now despite the size, it’s actually a bit heavier than the Fitbit Charge. Its new inactivity/move alerts match what the rest of the competition has had for years, namely Garmin & Polar first, and more recently competitors like Apple, Microsoft and Under Armour. This thing isn’t much bigger than a few pieces of Good & Plenty candy tied together. Given the size of the unit, I’m honestly not sure where they’d fit one in with expanding it. Now at $129, it lacks an optical HR sensor like the Charge HR has. You can see how it fits here on a women’s wrist (The Girl’s, to be precise). I’d rate it pretty darn resilient to accidental removals. The two band sides snap in using a clever little push-button system, and then the bands hold together with a double-holed clasp.

Then $59 for the leather bands (like the one seen above), and finally $99 for the stainless steel bangles.Īs for the bands, they are much smaller than the Fitbit Charge/Charge HR – or even the equally pretty display of the Polar A360: The accessory bands are $29 for the ‘classic’ colored bands. Below I’ve got a brown leather, and black band option. For example, it includes changeable bands – something the Fitbit Charge/Charge HR lacked. Now, that quibble aside – from a spec and usability standpoint, the unit actually does a good job at balancing features and form.

#Fitbit alta activity and sleep tracker update

Luckily, once they decide to move onto the first phase of acceptance, it’s a relatively trivial software update to add to these devices. The excuse of ‘trying to keep things simple’ holds about as much water as a Starbucks napkin. That’s Fitbit with proper smartphone notifications. You know when you’re at work, and there’s always someone (we’ll call him Bob), that’s been upset about the change in coffee filters for years, despite everyone else already moving past it and well beyond caring. I feel like there’s gotta be some single person at Fitbit that’s horribly against proper smartphone notifications. Instead, both rely on just text and phone alerts – which is completely opposite what the entire rest of the industry has done (this means you can’t get things like Twitter or Snapchat notifications). Further, neither unit includes the ability to do true/proper smartphone notifications. That means it’ll usually be fine in the shower, but definitely isn’t something you’d take swimming (or high diving). On the downside, neither is waterproofed terribly well, claiming only 1ATM waterproofing – or effectively a non-official variant of IPX7.

#Fitbit alta activity and sleep tracker full

And lastly, both units feature tap/touch capable screens (the Alta’s being an OLED mono-color display, whereas the Blaze is full color LCD). For example, both units get about 5 days of battery on a single charge, and both carry with it the new auto-recognize functionality. There are actually a number of similarities between the two units, from battery life to notification capabilities. The Fitbit Alta comes almost exactly one month after Fitbit’s announcement of the Fitbit Blaze at CES, which is their higher end ‘smart fitness watch’. It also goes vintage and re-gains the ability to change your bands for various options, like the old Fitbit Flex. However, unlike those, this unit sports smartphone notifications, move reminders, and the ability to auto-recognize workouts (the Charge/Charge HR only has caller ID). This unit is effectively a replacement for the existing Fitbit Charge (or previous to that, the Force). Today Fitbit announced their latest activity tracker – the Fitbit Alta.