My husband and I both bought an Ionic in May 2018. We have both experienced the problems I am detailing below but his started at the very beginning and mine waited 14 months to begin. He dealt with all of these issues every time he ran for 6 months and, finally, in December 2018 he put his Ionic in a drawer after running a half marathon with no music, time or mileage tracking because it decided to keep restarting itself repeatedly while he was running. Other than the occasional restarting early in a walking activity (which is irritating enough all by itself), mine worked perfectly for the first 14 months of ownership. About 3 months ago, my Ionic started having all of these same problems and they are now a regular (if not daily) occurrence for me.
• Restarts itself during an exercise activity – sometimes multiple times during an activity – I’ll be in the middle of a run and my music stops so I know my Ionic has rebooted itself. I stop and look at my Ionic and it’s in the middle of a reboot. I lose the last part of my run and have to wait on it to restart. Because of this, I have to keep a very close eye on my distance so I’ll know how far I’ve gone when it restarts because there is no rhyme or reason as to when it will happen. Of course, constantly watching my time and distance causes more drain on my battery so I have to choose between knowing my distance when it reboots and saving my battery. Last week I also had a day when it completely shut down as I was about to go for a run and I could not get it to turn back on or even recognize the charger for several minutes. It had a full battery and I was literally standing outside about to begin my warm up walk and it just turned off. None of the buttons had any effect and I plugged it in to see if something had drained my battery but nothing happened. I kept trying and after a few minutes it finally came back on. My battery was still at 98% so there is no explanation as to why it shut down. The rebooting during activity was not a regular occurrence for me until after a factory reset (explained below) but it happened all the time for my husband.
• Music cutting out – was told by technical support that it is a “known problem” with Trekz Air headphones but it didn’t happen for the first 14 months. Sometimes it is so bad that I have to stop the music completely because I can’t listen to it with it being so broken. It cuts out/skips and is affected by arm movement – my arm moving backward in my walking/running motion, turning my hand with palm facing sideways or up makes it much worse while holding my wrist near my neck/head will help alleviate the skipping but I can’t run with my hand near my head. A lot of days the skipping isn’t too bad when I begin running and then, for some reason, it just starts skipping constantly. My husband was using the Bose earbuds with his Ionic and his did this every time he used it from the very beginning. It would also alternate ears that it was sending the sound to so it would go from left to right to left to right over and over the whole time he was running.
• Sometimes the GPS takes a really long time to connect even though I’m standing in the same spot where I always begin my walk/run and there isn’t a cloud in the sky (and not underneath trees). I always reboot my Ionic before my activity because the distance is not accurate if I don’t and it usually finds the GPS signal fairly quickly. However, some days I can stand there for 2-3 minutes, at least, before it connects and I can begin my activity. Yesterday I waited and waited and finally used my phone to track my warm up walk. The GPS connected pretty quickly when I was ready to run but it never would connect for my walk. My husband had this same issue and sometimes his GPS would not connect at all to track his run.
• GPS activity not syncing distance/time/splits – sometimes the app will show an activity but not actually record the time, distance, splits, etc., even though the GPS was used to track the activity. The most recent time this has happened was Monday when I ran 8.6 miles using the GPS on my Ionic but when I synced my steps and activity it just shows that I was running for 50 minutes with no distance, splits, etc. Sometimes an activity doesn’t show up at all. When I run I have a warm up walk, run and then cool down walk. Some days one of the walks does not show up at all when I sync.
• Battery life is an issue at times when using the GPS. I realize that GPS and music drain the battery but 3 – 3.5 hours is pretty much the maximum activity time. We both have a goal of running a full marathon and there is absolutely no way we can do that with the Ionic using GPS and music. It just isn’t possible with the battery life the way it is now.
• I have my Hourly Activity (250+ steps) set for 8 am until 6pm. There have been a few days that I got all 10 hours but when I sync the app does not show them all. Monday was also the most recent time that this happened. It shows that I did not get in 250 steps during the 12, 1 and 2 pm hours even though I was running and walking during the 12 and 1 pm hours.
I contacted technical support about the music issues and the tech I spoke with acknowledged the issues with Trekz Air headphones. I was advised to do a factory reset and that should help. It didn’t. In fact, it made my problems worse. The music hasn’t gotten any better at all and now, after the reset, my Ionic reboots itself during pretty much every run and many walking activities when it was previously only an occasional problem for me. I’ve even had it reboot while I was walking but not tracking with the GPS.
I also performed a factory reset on my husband’s Ionic hoping to resolve some of his issues. Now his Ionic will not even track his steps. I’ve worn it myself to test it and it never tracked a single step taken over the course of a couple of a hours and over 1,000 steps tracked by my Ionic. Prior to my husband putting his away, he contacted tech support more than once and none of their solutions helped his issues.
The primary purpose in purchasing the Ionic was to have built-in GPS and music so that we could stop running with our phones. Between the music cutting out and the Ionic rebooting itself mid-run, I’ve had to resort to running with my phone again on several different occasions. Even though my husband put his away out of frustration, he wants to be able to use it again but his won’t function at all now, even after the factory reset. I’ve been a faithful Fitbit user for almost 5 years and we’ve had 5 devices between my husband and me. When mine works like it should, I love the features it offers. The level of frustration of having it reboot itself, music cutting in and out and the other issues I addressed is unexplainable, though.
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