You know, its funny that Fitbit Charge 5 is the first production after Google bought Fitbit (I don't include Charge 4 because it was probably designed before the purchase happened and released later when production had made enough of them). This means that Charge 5 is Google's child. Everything Google produces, seems to suck and crash and burn. Remember that Google Glass? The eye piece that was supposed to overlay details for you like having digital glasses? Yeaaaaaa.....
So, Fitbit team removed lots of things from the Charge 5. Some of them quite important even. Lots of exercise options for one, are gone. Now you're down to some standard things.
The built in GPS is the most terrible thing I've ever used. it appears to still use your phone for GPS which makes it a huge lie on the product its self. Charge 3 required connecting to your phone's GPS to work, Charge 5 appears to do the same thing or at the very least, its own GPS doesn't function if you aren't connected to your phone. So those detected exercises I go on? It doesn't have any GPS data at all. How worthless is that! I have to actually manually activate an exercise on it to get it to start using the GPS, and the GPS keeps disconnecting during when my phone had a bad connection. Seriously?
Not to mention, Fitbit removed the ability to view lots of interesting information during your exercise, they replaced the entire exercise app with a two button piece of crap that doesn't even let you see the current time or anything. Its as if their team got dumber, or lazy, or both. I can't even exit the app while its running to see my heart rate or time. This makes Charge 5's exercise system worthless. It sucks I found this out after my return period ended because I bought this in Winter and hadn't had a warm day to exercise with it till lately.
Oh yea, they removed Weather too! If anyone noticed that. That was sad.
The apps on the Charge 5 are basic versions of what they used to be on the Charge 3 I had. There's less features, less capability, less accuracy. My Fitbit Premium is worthless, now so I don't intend to renew it. Not gonna pay for a service on a crummy device that is known by everyone to be a huge flop. Its as if the company up and croaked after Google bought them.
I can only hope that the developers at the fitbit team actually see this and decide to start making changes for the Charge 6 to fix the things they removed from Charge 5 and put them back in. The next product needs to have more capability than the previous, not less. Just because you gave it color doesn't make it better. Especially when all your clock faces suck. If only we could design our own.
Moderator edit: subject updated for clarity
