The Charge 5 seems to randomly make drastic miscalculations for heart rate during exercise, and I'm losing all faith that it is able to measure heart rate at any time with any degree of consistency or accuracy.
The drops are usually to about a half or a third of the actual rate.
It will sometimes be accurate within 1-2% for a while, and then just completely drops the ball, and nothing seems to get it reading again, not adjusting straps, not rebooting. And I've been watching it while comparing to an actual on-chest heart monitor, and when the fitbit does pick accuracy back up again, it seems to be without any external changes.. no adjusting position or restarting or anything, it's just suddenly accurate again.
I'm not sure whether I'll be allowed to post an image yet, but I've overlaid an 31 minute ellipical workout from today with the data recorded by the fitbit auto detected activity. Note that the period about 5 minutes in on the green line from the on chest monitor where the heart beat suddenly drops was because I paused the elliptical work out for a minute or so in order to try rebooting / 3 dot restarting the Fitbit when it was clear it wasn't in the mood to register above even about 90 bpm after 5 minutes of working out.
The Fitbit data also starts much later, possibly due to the reboot, but that's also a general pattern of very poor exercise detection.
Although the exercise chart in Fitbit appears to have some kind of smoothing on it, I watched the Charge 5 screen as it jumped from 170 to 130 in a second, while my heart rate was still definitely way over 170.
I've been trying so hard to get this to device to work for me and help improve my lifestyle, but I'm really not happy. I'm seeing a lot of people saying that other devices weren't as bad, but this is my first Fitbit device, so I've got nothing to compare it too (well, except for a selection of other heart monitors which all show similar figures to each other, but completely different numbers from the Charge 5).
Some days it seems better than other, perhaps after a fresh charge? I'm not sure whether there's an pattern to these issues or it's just an outright hardware design failure, or bad software implementation, but then it's not my product to investigate, I'm just reporting that it categorically IS a major issue.
Apart from this issues, one of the reason chose a device listed in the Google store was because I wanted to use it with Google Fit, and it fails even on that front. And how does an app from a Google owned company in 2022 not support dark mode without hacking around in developer menus?
What I'd like to see is some kind of any official statement acknowledging on these problems and that they are being actively investigated (and not just the same copy paste "have you tried turning it off and on responses).
In a way, under reporting exercise might is better than over-reporting, but it's frustrating knowing that a workout worth 61 zone minutes in Google fit only counts for 20 zone minutes in the Fitbit app. And that the Fitbit app might be recommending me to do 50-90 minutes of exercise, when I should be doing active recovery.
The heart rate tracking during exercise not working correctly would also be more tolerable if the Fitbit app was able to sync the REAL workout data from Google Fit and overwrite the bad data from the Charge 5, so perhaps that's something for Fitbit to work on too?
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