Will the Charge 6 track floors?

[ChrisFrohlich]

Can someone confirm whether or not the Charge 6 will contain an altimeter?  i.e. Will the Charge 6 track Floors?

I've been reading specs but see no mention of it.  That, along with the responses in this forum around the launch of Charge 5 would indicate to me that the answer is "No".

That said, this would be such a (repeated) disappointment that I figured I'd give the brand and product representatives the courtesy of a chance to respond (preferably with some rationale/explanation) before determining my opinion.

Anyone else out there feeling the same?

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[capewrath3]

I am still with the Fitbit. Better the devil you know as someone else has said.                           

I believe that Fitbit weren’t prepared to pay for the extortionate price for the satellite tracking that is needed for the Altimeter.

I should imagine the price would have put the Fitbit’s at a very high cost.

[ChrisFrohlich]

There was a hardware altimeter in the Charge 1-4 @capewrath3 it never required satellite connectivity.  Google simply chose to remove the altimeter, and only leave it in place in more expensive models. 

At this point I agreee with @LZeeW that Google/Fitbit won't tell us why they made the decision (lots of opportunity).  This leaves me to draw my own conclusions, and the simplest motivation to me is greed.  That is, remove the altimeter from the least expensive model and force customers who want it to buy more expensive models. 

This is troubling as I've invested a lot of time and attention in my FitBit data and I'm worried Google is exploiting that to execute a hard upsell.  Disappointment in a product is one thing, disappointment in the people behind it is another. 

Again, if anyone from Google/ Fitbit is reading this, an explanation is still (after all this time) appreciated.  Consider, why does this thread keep popping up?  Why are the views so high if you haven't caused a negative reaction with your customers?

[FitbitUser1214]

How come we had FLOORS counted in my previous Fitbit 5 or 4.

Sent from my iPhone

[RiekoC]

Hello @FitbitUser1214 

Please see @LZeeW 's response.

The Charge 4 had an altimeter and tracked floors. The Charge 5 & 6 do not have an altimeter.

[Gryllotalpa]

I think the reasons for dropping the altimeter in Charge 6 do make sense. In Charge 4, and probably also 5, the altimeter operated based in air pressure changes. This is inherently unreliable unless you have access to realtime air pressure data at the same location and constant elevation, because without this reference you are simply measuring a combination of altitude (floors) and weather. Also, it is quite difficult, if not impossible,  to recognize floors walked from those rolled on an escalator! When I had a Charge 4, I sometimes clocked quite a few floors without ever leaving the ground floor if our house, simply due to weather 

In theory, it might be possible to combine GPS data and real- time weather ( air pressure) reports, but that would mean developing a whole new technology (and having access to real time weather data all over the world). Older Charge versions clearly did not have this 

In summary, the altimeter data of older Charges were sometimes garbage, and you could never tell when is that "sometimes". Better forget about such an unreliable method 

[ChrisFrohlich]

@Gryllotalpa the pixel watch (2&3) tracks floors presumably with the same altimeter solution that was in the charge 4.  The accuracy of the instrumentation can be debated I suppose, but Id offer that debate was settled within fitbit when they embedded the hardware in multiple models and wrote the software to expose it.  I have seen some mixed results, but also some very accurate measurements, especially over longer ascents where I knew the elevation change. 

All that aside, consider, if the reason to cut the altimeter was lack of accuracy, why put it in the premium model?  Why not just walk away from the feature altogether? 

"Nudging" (I'm being generous) customers to buy more expensive models seems the most plausible explanation to me.  Everyone reading should ask themselves the same question imho.

[mojo1160]

A barometric altimeter only needs to measure the delta between where you were and where you are to determine elevation. And as sketchy as this sounds, this type of device has been around for a very long time and is surprisingly accurate. In the mid 19th Century (1847 sounds right, but I’d have to look it up) Elijah Mitchell measured the height of Mt. Mitchell using a barometric altimeter, and came within 12 feet of modern measurements. That was nearing a 6700 foot mountain, but scale that down to one flight os stairs, and Mitchell’s device probably fails. But it’s no longer 1847 either.

As to the notion that an escalator or elevator would add floors, this is baked into the calculation on the Garmin equivalent of the Charge 4, and only counts the elevation change if there’s a corresponding forward motion. So there are multiple measurements going into this output.

The fact that there aren’t any trackers with an altimeter (of any brand that I’ve found) that fall in the Charge 6 price point, and you only find that feature in the spendier models suggests to me that it’s planned obsolescence and a push to get people into pricier instrumentation. And it will work. Because the illusion of “need” has been created and then taken away. You want that feature, it’s going to cost you more now.

[Cheong00]

My previous tracker is Fitbit Charge 2, and from my experience the floor recording is quite accurate.

The altimeter problem only exists on versions produced after Fitbit becomes part of Google.