Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsHeart rate tracking actually somewhat decent - UPDATED x3
Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2021
Most important (to me, anyway): the heart rate monitor is actually somewhat accurate!! I’ve been trying and failing for years to find an accurate heart rate monitor that can be worn on my wrist and not around my chest. This is the first I’ve found that actually performs well not only while sitting around but also while working out!! I’ve done weight training, HIIT workouts, hiking and treadmill workouts and it’s worked pretty good during all of them. Now it's not *as* accurate as a chest strap, so don't have your expectations set to expect perfection, but it’s still much better than previous wrist models. It also works great for step tracking.
The last watch I tried was the Fitbit charge 4 and it seemed accurate while doing nothing, but not at all while working out. See my attached workout comparison. It was so frustrating doing a really intense workout and seeing it display my heart rate at 100 (which is about what my heart rate is while brushing my teeth). When I knew from manual readings it was closer to 160. Even when on the treadmill with my wrist not flexing at all, the Charge couldn’t figure out my heart rate. I am very happy to have finally found a watch that can finally track my workouts!!
Your steps will be tracked even if your hands are resting on the treadmill bar or on a shopping cart, etc. Your wrist just needs to have a little motion for it to register the steps. So, if you’re resting your forearms on the cart or treadmill, it will NOT count the steps because your wrist is not moving with each step while in that position. But holding the bar with your hands will work just fine.
The screen is small, but extremely crisp and clear and easy to read. However, it has some software issues. Either moving your wrist or double tapping the screen is supposed to turn the watch face on. Twisting your wrist does work pretty reliably to turn it on. Double tapping does not. If the watch has been “asleep” for awhile and I try to double tap it it can take anywhere from 20-50 taps to get it to turn on. That’s a LONG time. And when I put it in sleep mode for the night (so the watch face doesn’t turn on while I’m moving around in my sleep), it can be very difficult to get it to turn on in the morning to be able to turn sleep mode off. A bit frustrating. But sometimes it does the opposite. Like this morning it was still in sleep mode but I turned my wrist and the screen turned on (it’s not supposed to and usually doesn’t!). And sometimes when the screen turns on even from just a wrist movement, it just starts to go crazy and will be scrolling up and down and pressing buttons and vibrating like crazy like some sort of poltergeist is messing with me. Trying to press the screen and stop it does nothing. It takes it a few minutes to calm down and stop doing this, but so far it always does eventually stop and will start working normally again once I’ve let it exorcise its demons.
A couple other things to note:
-This has no altimeter and it will not tell you how many flights you’ve gone up. Somewhat disappointing, since I found that interesting as we live by the mountains and hike a lot. But it’s more important to me that the heart rate works accurately (which it does) so this isn’t a deal breaker for me
-There is no on-board gps, you’ll need to have your phone on you to use for gps tracking if you want it. I always have my phone on me when I’m out anyway in case of emergency so for me, again, not a deal breaker.
-The battery lasted me about 6.5 days. I was using it constantly during this time, so I am quite impressed with how long it went before needing a recharge.
-When you are on the “home” screen, it shows the time and below it will be switching between showing you your basic daily info (heart rate, steps, active minutes,etc). If you manually tap the screen while on this, you can manually switch to see whichever of those you want to see below the time. So in the morning I tap my screen until I see my heart rate is below the time and then it remembers that that’s what I want to see and the next time I flip my wrist it is still showing my heart rate. You can set it to whichever you like though, like if you want to always see your step count then just tap it until it’s below the time and it’ll show you that next time you flip your wrist. It does “forget” after awhile sometimes, but it’s easy to set it again and overall it works pretty well.
As usual, the straps are removable/interchangeable. So you can put on prettier bands or extensions or what have you. I personally like the feel of the soft, silicone wristbands so I’m leaving mine as is. I have a pretty small wrist (about 5.5”) and the back of the watch makes excellent contact with my skin and my bones don’t get in the way to interfere with readings or get bruised. It’s quite comfortable even wearing it all day and night (I’ve only taken it off to shower).
I love the fitbit app. It’s easy to use and navigate. And the 6 months of free premium (normally costs 9.99 a month) you get with this too is nice, I find it interesting to see my sleep stats each morning. Stats like breathing rate, skin temperature, and heart rate variability are included with premium. This watch DOES have an SpO2 monitor but as of now it has not been activated on the luxe so you can’t get readings from that yet. Not sure when that will be available it doesn't specify yet.
Overall, despite the software bugs/screen turning on issues, I really am happy with how well this works for heart rate tracking (especially while workout out!). If you’re willing to have a little patience with it and deal with these small annoyances (hopefully there will be an update to fix these problems eventually), I still think it’s well worth it for the heart rate tracking alone. Hope this helps you make a more informed decision!
UPDATE: More issues keep coming up. The screen keeps freezing on a black screen with just navigation dots at the top and no amount of tapping or twisting or charging will get you off this black screen. I do not see a way to do a manual reset (there is a reset under settings on the watch but when the watch is non-responsive you of course can't get to it) I figured out that you can then go to the Fitbit app and change your watch face selection. This will update the watch and make it start functioning again. Then you can switch back to the watch face of your choice. This has been happening once or twice a day now and seems to be happening more often. Not a good sign.
Also several times I've noticed when it looks like the watch is working it's not actually counting my steps. It was frozen at 9993 steps last night and I walked around the house for 5 minutes and it was still at 9993. I sat down for 10 minutes and tried again and it finally went up to 9996. But it clearly was still experiencing a major delay and the step number did not catch up to all those steps I know I got during those 5 minutes. It's possible this has been happening frequently but I rarely check my steps until the end of the day so I really can't say for sure. I have to deduct another star until they get some of these issues fixed. They are becoming more than just a slight annoyance at this point. I am still holding out hope for an update to fix at least some of these problems before my return window is closed.
2ND UPDATE: They released an update today (July 23rd)! I installed the update through the app on my phone and the app kept giving me an error - telling me there was a problem with the update and it couldn't complete, but on my watch it said the update was complete. So I completely shut down the app and restarted and now it says my watch is updated, so hopefully that's true. Just add it to the list folks. I can't find any information anywhere about what this update contained, but I'm hopeful anyway. I'll update in a week as to whether or not it's helping with the issues I've been experiencing.
3rd UPDATE: It's been just over a week and I don't think the update did much of anything. Still locked up again yesterday, but I've found after about 30 minutes or so it will usually fix itself. And I think it's still monitoring heart rate and steps decently well while the watch itself may seem unresponsive. I find myself checking it less and less through the day so I don't have to deal with the issues as much. I mainly just look at my stats each morning and at the end of the day on the app. I think I'm going to keep it despite the ongoing issues as I do enjoy comparing my daily results and looking at my sleep stats every morning.