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LizzyFitbit
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LizzyFitbit
In general, so far I don't like but also I don't dislike Charge 6. I already know it's not for me due to lack of altimeter but that won't affect my first impression. I haven't tested sports tracking yet due to illness (hoping to get back on my feet tomorrow). The last Charge I used was Charge 2 and then I moved to Ionic, Sense, and Sense 2 so I have no prior experience with newer Charge models.
Pairing with the phone (Android)
I've heard stories of Fitbits not pairing with a mobile app but I've never experienced that myself... until now. This wasn't an easy process. It took a while for the app to find my Charge 6. Then went to the usual PIN code. After that, however, the app went directly to the firmware update screen and got stuck on 0% forever. At this point, my Charge 6 was showing the usual Fitbit icon and nothing else. After some time, I decided to kill the app and launch it again. It went to the main screen, and my Charge 6 was paired but I couldn't see anything else but the Fitbit logo/little phone. There was a banner to update my Charge 6 and eventually, it got updated (took very long). The whole process from unboxing to being able to use the Charge 6 took a little over an hour. Not the best experience out of the box.
User interface
I kind of like it. The display is very small but navigation is smooth. Due to the sizing, usually, we can see only one icon at a time. It's good although I would like to have a kind of "folding" option which replaces icons with labels. This would mostly be useful in quick settings (swipe down from the main screen). But overall it isn't a bad design for such a small screen.
The "small screen" means here "smaller than it looks" as the real display is much smaller than the glass area (this may mislead buyers as it isn't obvious, it did trick me). The red border shows an actual display size:
There is no obvious indication of that. The tracker's display visually looks larger than it really is.
The brightness seems to be good although I haven't had a chance to test it in bright sunlight conditions (Autumn in the UK isn't helping).
The display is small but there is an option to magnify UI with 3-taps which I find useful (and my eyes are not the worst). This is a nice feature. After magnifying user can pan the screen with a finger:
The button
As far as I know, Charge 5 was stripped of a button and users didn't like it. Charge 6 brings back a haptic button which has a strange feel in the beginning. Unlike other haptic buttons (Sense, Versa 3), this one isn't indented but it's a bump. It makes an impression of being a real button. At first, I was expecting I could press it like a button in my old Charge 2. It may be just my brain but because of the shape of a button, I constantly have a feeling as if it's stuck and doesn't want to move. That was definitely my first impression. I think I'm slowly getting used to it though but like I said, it felt strange at first.
I wear my Charge 6 on the right wrist so the button faces my wrist. One of the issues I had with original Sense was an accidental pressing of the button during activities but also during sleep. Pressing it during sleep generated vibration which often woke me up. Charge 6 addressed the issue and now we have a "Button Lock" option in the settings. Once the device screen goes black, the button stops working. The button will work again when the screen is awake. It's one of those features which is "almost there but not quite" and little more is needed. For example, I'd like to disable the button at all times (regardless of screen state). Otherwise, if I want to make sure it won't mess up my exercise I need to disable screen wake with wrist gesture (because accidental wake will enable the button again which may happen during ie. bodyweight training). However, this option will help with preventing accidental presses when wearing gloves (if the watch is on the right wrist, like in my case) or during pushups. I find that this setup works best if we want to prevent an accidental button press during a workout:
- screen wake: manual
- button lock: on
- always-on display: on
Not ideal (could be done with more options for Button Lock) but better than nothing. My Sense and Sense 2 could benefit from such an option and save me from frustration.
Water lock
Water lock is another option I always needed on Ionic, Sense and Sense 2. Charge 6 comes with a water lock (some other models received it previously but smartwatches never did) but again: "almost there but not quite".
It is possible to lock the touchscreen when nothing is going on, we are not in the middle of tracking an exercise or using a tracker any other way. This is ok when ie. showering. It will work when we rely on auto-recognized activities, too. However, I track my activities manually using the Exercise app and the problem I encountered many times was rain and sweat touching the screen during running or cycling. I have a number of activities prematurely ended or paused because of water. The water lock on Charge 6 will not solve this problem and the screen of Charge 6 is extremely sensitive to water. Pity. It's a feature I always wanted but it's of no use to me implemented this way. When showering, I can take the tracker off but can't do that when exercising in the rain or wearing a base layer with sweaty sleeves covering the display.
HR on equipment
This was the very first feature I wanted to test. It's the first Fitbit device that comes with the ability to broadcast HR over BLE. It's feature users have been asking for a very long time. Unfortunately, again "almost there but not quite", although this time saying this is an understatement. I haven't been able to use broadcasting with any equipment I own (two bike computers, PolarV650 and Garmin Edge 1030+, experimentally trying to use Charge 6 as external HRM for Garmin Fenix 7 and Suunto watch, didn't work with SportyGo! app on Galaxy Watch 5, in the gym: Concept2 rower, Wattbike bike). It worked with my mobile phone, tablet and PC (so could use it with Strava or Zwift). Worked with one treadmill (although it was a bit of a chore to get connected). Didn't work with a non-motorized curved treadmill I use in a gym. This is not what you expect from the "broadcast HR" function. External HRMs just work. When one gets a chest strap or HR arm band there's not thinking whether it will or won't work. It just works. It's a standard. I can broadcast HR from my Garmin watches to any equipment same as if I used a dedicated external monitor. This feature was probably the greatest disappointment.
Google apps
They do work. YouTube Music controls work just fine. It can be used during exercise which is nice (and quite a standard on fitness trackers so it's not like Fitbit invented a wheel). I use Spotify and despite having YTMusic it's not my choice for a music service. I'd rather have generic music controls not bound to any music service.
Google Maps does work. It's the same app as it was on Sense 2. Nothing great but some people will find it useful.
Google Wallet - can't test, my cards are not supported.
Timers
I decided to write about it for one reason:
My understanding of the statement above is that I could use timers while exercising. For example, I start Weights and then I can time my sets or I can run and time my intervals (if it's more complicated than Rest/Work as in Interval Workout). Unfortunately, this is not the case and I think this may be misleading for some users, too. Also, the Stopwatch is useless due to lack of precision. There are no milli/microseconds. If I want to time my 100m sprint, it will be rounded to whole seconds 🤷
Next, I will test HR accuracy during activity (as soon as I get better so can go out into the Autumn rain :P)
Moderator Edit: Clarified subject
Best AnswerRunning: 30:00 Progression Run
I took Charge 6 for the very first run. Since I'm not feeling 100% so decided to do a progression run workout well under my threshold. Also, this test was supposed to show whether I could rely on the built-in GPS (the short answer is 'no').
The structure of the workout was the follows:
In short, it means that each 10-minute interval required running slightly faster (outputting more power). The transition was quite smooth. Intervals 1 and 5 were a very easy warm-up and cool-down. Total of 50 minutes workout.
First.. well... GPS... here we go:
Here's what happened. The GPS connected, then a few seconds later disconnected, reconnected a few moments later, and almost instantly lost connection and never recovered. From the 5th minute, there was no GPS anymore, the tracker gave up on it. I know I could have enabled Dynamic GPS but that wasn't the point of this test. The tracker has no altimeter. I'm pretty sure many users would trade the unreliable GPS for an altimeter. Especially, that Charge 6 is designed as tethered to the mobile phone (no offline music, needs to sync to view exercise details). The first attempt at using built-in GPS tells me that it's just a waste of precious space on a circuit board.
The next thing to look at is the heart rate. I compared it against the Garmin HRM+ chest strap (orange - Charge 6, blue - HRM+):
The first 10 minutes (pretty much the entire warmup) were very problematic for the Charge 6. I picked this kind of workout for a reason. It doesn't involve short intense intervals so it should be relatively easy to track. Each interval is 10 minutes long and assumes a steady pace within the specified interval range. So nothing tricky to track. After the warmup, Charge 6 picked up the right HR and followed quite closely the chest strap. However, it's visible the orange HR is slightly below the blue one but for a little tracker, close enough. I'm not quite sure why the first 10 minutes didn't work well but I think the tracker locked onto my cadence. The highest HR (194bpm) is quite close to my running cadence (195spm). It's not too bad if the workout is long (1hr+) but for short 15 to 20min sessions if the first 10 minutes are inaccurate then it's hard to call the HR reliable. Depends on view. Personally, I wouldn't care much (my running workouts are by the power not heart rate). Despite the initial hiccup, there's only 1 beat difference between the chest strap average (164bpm) and Charge 6 (163bpm).
I use a custom heart rate zone set to my anaerobic threshold but there is no time in that zone anywhere specified. Neither elevation gain (but that is obvious due to lack of altimeter).
I wish one day I could say that Fitbit is a great brand for runners but so far I can't. Charge 6 isn't crafted for runners. There is no option for manual laps on the tracker (I wanted to mark a lap for each interval but found it impossible).
Last thing - the weather. I started running during a little drizzle and the screen didn't do anything unwanted but by the end of my run heavier rain started and it happened that rain switched metrics. Good thing it didn't swipe up to pause/end my run. Didn't happen a lot (two times) but this confirms the need for a proper Water Lock.
Best AnswerRun #2. 45'@easy(steady pace), 7x(30"@all-out, 30sec@recovery ), 1'30"@easy, 6x(15"@all-out, 15"@recovery)
Today, I used Dynamic GPS which worked slightly better but I lost the GPS connection multiple times. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It isn't good. It's just bad:
It's quite a significant portion of the route (the entire course was 13.28km). The good thing is that Charge 6 captured a little more than yesterday. The bad thing is it kept dropping the GPS connection randomly. Those drops are visible on the elevation chart (yes, the data contains elevation, surprised?):
Each straight line means lost GPS. Interesting here is however that despite the lack of an altimeter, there is an elevation inside the TCX file! The elevation chart is not shown in the Fitbit app and I'm not sure what is the source of the elevation. It's certainly incorrect if compared with the right one (blue, this route is flat as a pancake):
This may be coming from the GPS data (hence it disappears when GPS is gone) and that would explain the lack of precision (the altitude from GPS is very inaccurate and may vary even within the 50m range). This may be a reason Fitbit decided not to display it and not to show an elevation gain. I don't know that. I guess better not to have an elevation chart at all than to get it horribly wrong (and the same could be said about built-in GPS).
The heart rate on the other hand positively surprised:
Again, I tested it against the Garmin HRM+ chest strap and the first 45 minutes (steady state) did work incredibly well. Only the first minute or so matches less but that isn't a problem. The first set of 7 reps of 30sec sprints looks less accurate but it's better than anything I have seen on any Fitbit watch so far:
The intervals were short and Charge 6 couldn't fully pick up the spikes but did some effort to do so at least. The interesting bit is that the spikes seem to follow a pretty similar pattern: rise, flat, rise, drop. Not too bad. Short intervals were impossible to track for my Sense and Sense 2.
The next set involved 15sec reps all-out which left even less time for HR to elevate:
There is a bit of delay but still Charge 6 does quite a good job trying to detect elevated HR. It managed to detect max HR very close to the chest strap:
Chest strap vs Charge 6:
This is pretty good for a little tracker and I am impressed. There will be almost certainly a problem with weight training though due to the nature of short sets and wrist movement) but that is yet to be checked. For me, the evidence of accuracy will be presented by outdoor cycling which I have never managed to capture correctly with any Fitbit.
So far the HR is the best I have seen in the Fitbit family but the GPS (built-in and dynamic) didn't impress me at all. Next time, I will switch to "Phone" mode. Probably, this is the only way to get some reliability out of the GPS.
Best Answer
Swimming. 1600m as 200m/FS + 3x400m/FS + 200m/FS
The tracker didn't die the first time in the pool which is great 👍 Yet, I am not impressed at all. Today, I swam 5 sets of freestyle (no drills, no kickboard, nothing tricky to track, good push-offs and flip turns). Total of 1600m with longer rest times between sets and shorter rest between reps of middle set.
Overall structure (from a different watch):
Moving pace 2:37/100m.
So here are the Charge 6 tracking results. I tracked it using the Swim exercise option:
There are several problems. First, the total distance doesn't match by a lot. It should have been exactly 1600m but ended up with 1025m. It's undercounted by 35%. This is a huge inaccuracy. Number of laps should be 64 and is 41. That means the Charge 6 didn't detect the new length nearly 20 times!
Another problem is that there is no breakdown of laps. I know that the laps had to be enabled on my Sense to see such a breakdown, however, I can't find such an option anywhere on Charge 6. That sounds like another downgrade. Now, there's even less data than before. Very disappointing and like with Sense 2, I'm not quite sure whether it's even worth it to take Charge 6 into the pool and risk potential water damage when there isn't much benefit from the tracking. Tracking lengths didn't work, there's no laps breakdown, and heart rate isn't there either (but that's common for all Fitbits). The tracker shows only a timer during swimming so there's not much use for it in the water (still users will need to count lengths in head).
If you want Charge 6 to track your swimming then it's probably not the right choice.
Rowing Machine. 11min workout, Concept2 rower
After swimming I went to do a very short session on the rowing machine. Since Concept2 is listed as "tested" for the HR broadcasting feature I gave it another go just in case it started working. Nope. The tracker wasn't even detected by the rowing machine as before. So I connected my chest strap to the rower (no problems). I should mention, my chest strap broadcasts via ANT+ and BLE. I tested BLE first to make sure the rower has it enabled (some gyms disable BLE connectivity on the equipment). It did connect but I prefer to use ANT+ (more stable and quicker to connect).
The heart rate tracking wasn't too great on Sense and Sense 2 when I was using the rowing machine (that's an understatement). The Charge 6 wasn't perfect but in most cases acceptable. The rowing machine does a lot to the wrist and that may affect readings. I used the Garmin HRM-Swim chest strap to validate Charge 6 data (it's a swimming chest strap but the only difference is the material the strap is made of so it "sticks" to the skin during strong push-offs, accuracy is the same as for the HRM+).
The structure of the workout was 5min@moderate/5 + 1min@rest + 5min@hard/10 . Watches haven't been paused during rest. I just want HR to drop before the harder interval.
What is very noticeable is that the readings are not obtained every second. Previous models are known to read HR every second during exercise. In the chart above it's seen that it's not the case. Datapoints are scattered and not continuous. It may be better for accuracy if it's an algorithm that tries to detect and correct errors. I have seen such a thing on Garmin during swimming (if a user decides to use wrist HR during swimming). The accuracy is a hit-and-miss in some areas, but overall I'd say it's acceptable. I must say here that I keep comparing relative accuracy considering Sense and Sense 2 and these two watches never came this close to the correct results. So it's not great but not the worst either. If I could give it a score, maybe 7/10 🙂
There is not much else to compare since the rowing machine doesn't track other metrics like stroke rate, etc. (Concept2 connects as a smart trainer to my other watch and gathers all the data but that can't be compared).
So far not too bad. I think it's still a better device than Sense 2 and Versa 4. Swimming seems to be slowly abandoned by Fitbit (who knows, maybe the next device won't support swimming at all). But overall it's a decent basic fitness tracker. Slightly unfinished but that is a domain of all Fitbit products 🤷 so hopefully, there will be an update improving certain areas.
I need to find some time to test it on the bike though. This is going to be "make-it-or-break-it" for HR tracking 😉
Best AnswerSwim (auto-recognized): 2x600m/FS + 2x400m/FS
My second swim with Charge 6. This time I decided to let Charge 6 detect my swimming workout. In the app settings, I reduced the auto-detection time to 10 minutes (from 15) as I wasn't sure whether it was going to pick it up. I never use auto-detection so I'm not sure whether I need to swim 10 minutes constantly so the watch can detect it. I don't know if I do shorter warmup intervals the tracker would detect my swimming. Never used Fitbit that way. Just to be on the safe side I decided for a longer first interval and swam 600m at a leisure/warmup pace so it could be autodetected.
When swimming is autodetected, Charge 6 will record heart rate(that is not the case for some other Fitbit watches like Sense and Sense 2). If I already got a heart rate then it makes sense to see how well the Charge 6 HR sensor works in the water:
This isn't too bad for a tracker that isn't supposed to track HR in the water. It follows the general HR trend. Intervals 2 and 4 seem to be captured best. The worst data quality has been registered for the very first long interval. Again, as previously found, the data isn't recorded every second. Looking at the data it seems to be recorded (mostly, not always) at every 2s interval. Short rests between main intervals show a very similar drop in HR to the chest strap (which is a dedicated chest strap model for swimmers).
There is a huge discrepancy for maximum HR but somehow the average HR lands very close. The standard deviation is double for chest straps (HRM: 9.19, Charge 6: 18.70) which isn't good (Charge 6 HR is more "noisy" which is visible on the chart) but the median is 137bpm for the HRM-Swim and 135bpm for Charge 6. This is pretty close. These numbers indicate that despite the noisy signal overall trend is preserved. I'm curious to see whether this is just a fluke or indeed Charge 6 sensor does a decent job in the water. Mind that testing other Fitbit devices with HR during swimming, the results weren't even remotely similar to this. It's a far cry from the quality of a chest strap but this tracker isn't supposed to measure HR during swimming and what I see here isn't bad.
Now, let's look at the final data:
The distance is 1875m. It means Charge 6 is again a few lengths short. Not as many as last time but it is still significant. It should be 2000m so we are 5 lengths short.
Looking at the average HR I must mention one thing - in my analysis, I took data from exactly the same timeframe for both devices. This is because the actual swim took 57 minutes but I am unable to tell the tracker I finished swimming when using the auto-detect feature. Hence, lower average HR on the screen than the one from my analysis.
Swim exercise adds AZM. Regardless, of whether there is HR or not. If we track swimming from the tracker, it will disable the HR sensor but will still grant AZM. It is some mysterious method of gaining AZM which I have no idea how it works without HR. If HR is there, the AZM doesn't seem to be derived from HR. 28x2 + 25 = 81AZM while the app granted 99AZM. Strange, but it's Fitbit.
If auto-detection works also with shorter intervals at the beginning (ie. 5x100m) then it may be the best way of recording the swimming with Charge 6. Starting recording manually from the tracker doesn't make much sense if the tracker itself shows nothing of use on the display. Letting auto-detect, as a bonus we get HR data. The distance is wrong regardless of the method used.
Best AnswerSwim (auto-recognized), 1x1000m/FS, 2x(100m/FS@hard+100m/FS@recovery), 2x(50m/FS@hard+50m/FS@recovery), 4x(25m/FS@vhard+25m/FS@recovery ) - total 2000m/FS
I tried again swimming with HR to see whether yesterday's swim was just a fluke. To make it harder to track, I added harder intervals after the initial easy 1000m. I tested the HR against two devices: Garmin Fenix 7 (wrist HR) and Garmin HRM-Swim (chest strap). Like before, I matched the timeframe of all activities. The results are quite surprising:
Charge 6 again did quite a good job and it beats Garmin Fenix 7 with an option to track HR in the water (although, I admit, Garmin doesn't recommend it). I may have been wearing the Garmin watch too loose but I am not going to look for an excuse as the data speaks for itself. The blue line is a "ground truth" from the chest strap, it's possible to see every interval and every set. The red dots are Charge 6. The HR readings appear every 2 to 3 seconds (rarely every 1s) hence the data points are so scattered. Yet they follow the HRM trend quite well (better than yesterday), the 400m interval with two more intense phases was captured very well. Initial 1000m follows the chest strap as well (this is where Fenix 7 failed). All devices captured rest periods between intervals. There isn't much to say except I'm genuinely impressed. I think Charge 6 should have an option to turn HR on during swimming (with a disclaimer, just in case) because it does quite a good job indeed! I don't know what Fitbit did to the new HR sensor, whether it's hardware or software (or both) but this holds up incredibly well!
The number of lengths didn't work again but this time Charge 6 overcounted by 4 lengths (came up with 2100m). I still can't figure out how AZM during swimming is being counted and probably will never know that.
Best Answer
