I actually did an experiment finally wearing both my Blaze and Charge HR for an entire day (sleeping and waking until going to bed at night) on the same arm. They surprisingly stayed very close the whole day except during Spin class! I was shocked at this as I was confident the Charge HR was overcounting since my husband somehow has so many steps and he doesn't do much walking during the day. What I have found is that the Charge HR counts for about 10% more steps than the Blaze does consistently (at least during the entirety of my experiment) but the Blaze gives more steps during Spin which makes more sense than the number of steps the Charge gave me. Btw - I took notes to and from my desk to the pantry, on my lunch break walking long distances in the city, to and from the subway, and the whole time was always about a 10% difference.
Then when I finally got home, I saw that I got about 97 steps for washing the dishes for about 30 minutes on the Charge HR (86 on the Blaze), but when my husband wore the Charge HR and did the same amount of dishwashing, he got over 800 steps on the Charge...neither of us do a lot of walking during dish washing obviously! This led me to a new conclusion: I believe both the Blaze and the Charge HR are actually pretty decent actual step trackers (especially since they stayed within 10% of each other in my experiment consistently throughout the day; the heart rate on both were almost identical throughout the day as well and even during Spin); however it is the NON step activity for which they are not the same. The Charge is a lot more sensitive to non-step activity especially depending on the user. When I realized this it made a lot more sense why my husband got so many steps at home in our small apartment. He's not walking...he just moves more than I do?
This was also confirmed when I spent an entire morning in the city walking around and got a little over 6k steps on my Blaze; this made sense to me as the distance I walked was approximately 3 miles in total. But a friend of mine had 5k steps on her charge HR without leaving her apt. Do you know how many times you'd have to circle a small NYC apartment to get 5k steps? The Charge, depending on the user, is highly sensitive to non-step based activity and I think that's why a lot of people are seeing such a significant decrease in their steps when they've switched to the Blaze.
Lastly to confirm my theory, my husband wore my Blaze on another day, when he got home from work he had a little over 4K steps instead of his usual 7k he gets from his Charge. Again this made perfect sense to me because the only walking he does on weekdays is to and from the apartment to his car and to and from the office to his car (very short distances). 7k steps is 3.5 miles approximately, he never walks that much! I'd go so far as to say the Blaze is still a bit generous. Hope my findings are helpful to the thread!
With all this I have accepted the differences between the models and am really still loving the Blaze. I can't really ever win any challenges against other Fitbit Users since theirs are so much more generous with steps, but I still find it fun and motivating regardless.
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