I have had my new Blaze for 12 days and the first three days it worked perfectly - a noticeable improvement on my Charge 2, particularly regarding accuracy of connected GPS activities.
However, the honeymoon is over and my Blaze now seems to be stricken with serious issues: -
Issue 1 - Active Minutes: Four days in and my Blaze developed an issue with under-recording Active Minutes by a significant amount. Active Minutes is my main exercise goal and my Blaze was down by more than 100 active minutes when compared to previous days with activities of a similar duration and level of intensity.
Example: Last Saturday I cycled a total of 23.10 miles around London and walked a further 3 miles during the day. I decided not to use connected GPS to save my phone battery on what was going to be a long day, as I was running GPS with my Urban Biker App to log ride stats and map my cycle ride.
Throughout the day my Blaze auto-recognised Outdoor Bike activities of more than 10 minutes in duration, with a total of 126 minutes recorded for Outdoor Biking. Urban Biker logged 228.5 minutes cycling for the day.
Out of the 126 minutes logged by my Blaze a grand total of ZERO minutes counted towards the day’s Active Minutes total, despite my cycling falling within the three heart rate zones.
My Blaze continues to be unreliable in recording Active Minutes, working fine one minute and not the next, which pretty much makes it useless for my needs.
Issue 2 – Battery life: Despite being 12 days old the battery on my Blaze lasts less than 2 days before I receive the low battery warning. I have not enabled Quick View as I do not need this feature and I have brightness set on Auto to hopefully conserve battery.
I have read many of the other posts on Blaze battery life issues, but I fail to see why Blaze owners should be expected to turn off features like All-Day Sync or Notifications to conserve battery life when the Blaze was designed as a smartwatch with these features. I am personally not too bothered about notifications, but All-Day Sync is requisite in my view.
Issue 3 – Bluetooth unpairing: Since last Friday my Blaze has started randomly unpairing from Bluetooth on my phone, even during connected GPS activities. Starting a connected GPS activity has become laborious as I am often met with ‘Phone Not Found’ on my Blaze. Manually syncing does not solve the problem and I end up having to restart my Bluetooth or restart my phone to resolve the issue.
Issue 4 - Fitbit: Fitbit support offered the Blaze to me at a discounted rate as a replacement for my faulty Charge 2. It was either use the discount to buy a Blaze or another Charge 2, which were the only fitness trackers Fitbit offered with the features I needed. At no point did Fitbit support staff make me aware that the Blaze had been discontinued for general sale by Fitbit as it was no longer being manufactured, despite Fitbit support advising me that the Surge had been discontinued in response to my query whilst raving about the Blaze. In the context of what appears to be known and long-standing issues with the Blaze some might consider this tantamount to mis-selling by omission.
It would be great if someone could help resolve these issues as I do rather like the Blaze in many ways, however, the clock is ticking for my statutory rights.
