What do you Think of your Ionic so Far?

[gibbyhome]

So I just ordered the new Ionic and it should arrive on Friday and was wondering about the ones that have received their Ionic so far what do you think?

• is it very heavy or light ?
• is it to big ? 
• what to you think about transferring music?
• how is the battery life? 
• is the screen bright enough?
• do it stay on long enough to read your text messages and can you respond to texts from the watch.
• how is the accuracy 
• I'm sure I will have a lot to say once I get mine in, i'm going from my Microsoft Band 2 that I loved and will miss dearly

[RLPage]

Did they improve on the band... I have had two surges and in both cases the band tore from the watch around 9 months of wear and tear.  The bands is a reason why I would go to the Apple Watch.

[alexian]

The band is replaceable now so you can get them pretty cheaply.

[Jeff2017]

I just got my Ionic yesterday and have only been wearing it for about 24 hours. I got the Blaze for Xmas last year and they are about the same size and style really. I do like the Ionic that is more built into the frame around it. My Blaze has a little wear and tear on those top and bottom edges that with the Ionic is framed in so I dont think it will have the same issue. It is to early for me to give any other advice as I have not fully used it as long as the Blaze. I do kind of like with the Ionic from the main screen if you swipe right it goes to a screen that shows the battery % and screen wake/ Notifications functions. My battery shows 76%, but I have only used it with the bare minimum functions. I have not done a workout so to speak. I went scuba diving today and tried to see if it would work in my drysuit. The first dive it shut it off I think from the movement under my drysuit and thermals. The second dive I loosened the strap so it would sit farther up my wrist and it seem to have worked. I might get a second set of wrist bands to sacrifice so that i can use a small bungee cord to make it a better fit on my forearm. I also signed up for Pandora and have a station and it is nice to be able to listen to music using blue tooth headphones. As I said I have not used it yet at the gym. thats all I got for now. I dont think I would use the fitbit pay yet or the Starbucks either.

[Bikerdog]

I've had the Ionic about 30 hours now, I like it. Here's my one day impression:

Setup - Mine did fail on the update but when I retried it it was up to date, so must of failed at the end or something but no big deal.

Relax - First thing I did was, well, take a nap. So before the nap I hit the relax app and breathed following the prompts, put me in a good zone for the nap. After I got up the watch gave a me a kudos message for taking a break, that was cool.

Sleep - The new sleep information, compared to my Surge, is amazing. It shows REM, light sleep, deep sleep, really good stuff.

Exercise - Set up earlier an Elliptical as an exercise shortcut and manually started it at the gym. For the most part it was good but started with a 186 heartbeat which made no sense but settled down to my normal 120-130 range I work out at. About half way through was another weird spike at 160 something so that's a bit weird but over all much more accurate then the Surge. I suspect the auto exercise should detect the exercise type as it worked well on my Surge.

Music - Managed to follow the instructions and create a playlist in WMP and  got some songs loaded to the watch, also got my bluetooth buds synced to the watch. So it all works just a bit  convoluted in the set up for sure.

Wallet - Set up an American Express card and happened to see the pay symbol when I was at Traders Joes and wa la, paid with my watch - even the clerk was impressed. 

Weather - shows my local weather, kind of cool. 

Goal met - coming back from the above mentioned store I reached my 10K steps and a neat display of colors etc. was displayed rewarding me, very nice. 

Summary - This is a awesome fitness watch, all I need now is the Golf app and I'll be all set. 

Battery - 31 hours later, 68%. Not bad but no GPS used yet, think I'll take a bike a ride tomorrow. 

[Colinm39]

@BikerdogI rubber stamp all of your findings... Smooth transition from the Blaze.  At the end of the day I will see how the Blaze, Ionic and One compare step wise.  So far they are only 200 steps apart.

Golf is in the exercise shortcuts under Ionic Settings. I also found out if you tick some save, edit, remove and tick and save you can eventually sequence the list for your Ionic Exercise screen which will show after you sync...

[Rach77]

The bands are replacable so its much better. Amazon have a selection of sports bands as well as some leather ones and stainless steel too.

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

[FastEddy-]

I received my burnt orange Ionic two day ago and it is soo nice!

It is my first fitness tracker, so i can't compare to other products. I am very happy with this device.

Setup was a breeze, I have no sync issues and the weather app is up to date and working great.  I really like all statistics about my daily activity and my sleeping process.  I fiddled a bit with the daily goals and now (after two days) I find myself striving to reach those goals  . (Honey, i am out for a little walk, I am missing some 1000 steps.)

The Ionic is very light, for a very small wrist it might be a bit large.

I didn't try all the functionalities already, transferring music is one of them. (a bit of a bummer that I seem need a win10 pc for this.)

After two days and two nights the battery is at 56%.

The screen is very bright.

I didn't try the smart-watch functionalities yet. For me, these are a nice extra but not very important. I just configured the notifications. Lets see what happens...

As far as I can tell the ionic is accurate, but I didn't compare it to other devices.

So far i am very happy with my Ionic.

For some reason I can't configure my wallet. The FitBit app crashes on the screen where I need to enter my cardnumber. I live in the Netherlands, so maybe this functionality is not yet available here.

That is the only issue i can think of for now. As I said, very happy with my Ionic.

Edwin.

[bkonichiwa]

I got mine Saturday night and so far my impressions are mostly positive.  

-As far as battery life, I went 5 days then charged it even though it was still about 35% and probably could have made it overnight.  I like the look and feel of it much better than the Blaze and the charging is way less persnickety since the cord just magnetically holds on.  

-As with any product at launch I expected bugs so I wasn't disappointed that some things didn't work. I loaded my starbucks card on there and even though it showed up it wouldn't work at the store.  I ended up having to fish out my phone to pay.  Not a big deal, and one I am sure they will fix over time.  Since I mostly mobile order anyway it isn't much of a buzzkill. 

-I had hoped this heart rate monitor would work just a tiny bit better than the Blaze and Surge while doing cardio, but I think I need to just accept that wrist heart rate monitors just don't work well doing things like elliptical.  In the 30 minutes that I was on the elliptical the highest it would register was 119 bpm while the elliptical was getting between 160 and 170, kind of a large discrepancy when the average bpm while I was on there was 95. 

-I showered in it and it was glorious not to have the panic attack that occurs when I remember I have my $200+ fitness tracker on like I used to with my Blaze.

-The vibration feels more robust for notifications and alarms.

-Better watch faces, I hate pink but the only face on the Blaze that gave me the info I wanted had pink numbers and it made me grind my teeth. 

-I linked my Bose headset and it worked fine for Pandora, I haven't tested it at the gym yet, but it will be nice to not have a phone/ipod to smack against things.

I keep reading about how Apple builds a better smartwatch and I have to say I would have to agree, but the apple watch doesn't do what I want it to do.  I don't mind a smartwatch lite if I can get 4 days of battery and much better sleep tracking.  Since the sleep tracking is of high interest to me I would not be satisfied with an apple watch anyway, I am the wrong demographic for that product.  In summary I am excited to see where the Ionic goes from here on out, once they get established and fix the launch bugs.  I expected that some issues would pop up once the product was "in the wild" and there would be a few updates to address the different ecosystem hiccups.  I think that it will be interesting to see where they go with things as they develop software to utilize the NFC and the other sensor for Pulse ox. I haven't tried to import my own music yet, I am really hoping they can streamline things so it doesn't seem so clunky and inefficient.  For now the pandora is fine for me. 

[peteer01]

• is it very heavy or light ?

It's light.

• is it too big ? 

Nope.

• what to you think about transferring music?

As long as you have your music in playlists in Windows Media Player (Windows 10) or iTunes (Mac), you'll be fine.  You may need to reboot after you've got Windows Media Player playlists and the Fitbit app installed, but transferring music is slow (limited to 802.11n speeds and slower than even that) but fairly straight forward.

• how is the battery life? 

Surprisingly good.  I'm fine with it taking a hit to get me SpO2 data.  That's what I'm really looking forward to.  Depending on how much music you listen to, how many recorded activities you do, YMMV, but the battery life seems great.

• is the screen bright enough?

Yup.

• do it stay on long enough to read your text messages and can you respond to texts from the watch.

Yes and no.  Yes you can read what you want, you don't response from the watch.

• how is the accuracy 

Of?  Heart rate?  Elliptical machines?  Treadmill distance counts?  Autodetecting activities like biking?  You're going to have to more accurately describe what you want us to describe the accuracy of.

My big cons are as follows:

No SpO2 data yet.

Seems to be 2.4 GHz only wireless (802.11n)

Otherwise it seems fantastic.

[ronjonb]

Luck you, we don't get Pandora in Canada, bah so no internet music

[Bejammin]

---

@ElDudarino wrote:

---

@thebaldgeek wrote:

Don't forget that the order of the first two apps set the two buttons on the right.....

---

You just blew my mind!    Thanks!

---

You just blew my mind as well.  Thank you very much!

[Bejammin]

---

@N8teGee wrote:

---

---

The screen can be set to always on during workouts. Just click the gear on the exercise shortcut and scroll down to "always-on screen"

---

Thank you very much for this!

@AntonyW wrote:

So far I feel like I've paid a lot of money to beta test a product that isn't ready for market yet.

This.  So very much this.  I've been looking forward to the Ionic and was even willing to pay 6 times what I paid for my Pebble Time to get it, on the understanding that Fitbit was serious about giving loyal Pebble + Fitbit users both something approximating the experience of these two excellent devices.

In fact, Fitbit has given me the newest, shiniest and most expensive Fitbit device ever released.  They are also promising that one day they might make it into a smartwatch, but they don't seem to know what a smartwatch is even thought they bought the first smartwatch company and promptly shut it down.  I am so baffled as to how this Ionic launch has happened this way.

[Denisefl]

What does it mean that the order of the first two apps sets the two buttons on the right? My right buttons don't seem to have anything to do with the first app screen. If I hold the top right button, music comes up (& that's not on my first screen of apps) and if I hold the bottom right button notifications come up. Thanks for any info!

[SunsetRunner]

Same here. 

[ddoyle777]

Denise

From your main screen swipe from right to left. This will show 4 icons. The upper left will be invoked by a quick push (not long) on the upper button on the right side. The icon in the bottom left position will be invoked by a push on the bottom button.

You can rearrange the icons so that the buttons quick activate the features you want.

[Denisefl]

Thank you for that explanation! This works just like was said from the clock face screen. Thanks again! Didn't know that feature was there.

[nzgeek]

i did a recent unboxing and first impression, please check it out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bvr917AAhYA&feature=youtu.be

[EvKo]

---

@nzgeek wrote:

i did a recent unboxing and first impression, please check it out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bvr917AAhYA&feature=youtu.be

---

Very nicely done! 

[wickedathletes]

• s it very heavy or light ?
  • Seemed light.
• is it to big ?
  • Not for a man. For a women I could see it being borderline,,, 
• what to you think about transferring music?
  • Terrible. Barely works. I reset the device 16 times within 1 week of buying it... Device went back after 2 weeks.
• how is the battery life? 
  • Seemed good. 3-4 days. 2-3 days if you use GPS a lot. 2 days if you use on-board music.
• is the screen bright enough?
  • Screen was nice.
• do it stay on long enough to read your text messages and can you respond to texts from the watch.
  • Text reading is funky but ok. No responding. Alerts are weird.
• how is the accuracy 
  • Pretty much on par with other FitBit devices. GPS seemed solid.

Overall the watch was nice, the software was extremely alpha though, no way around it. The UI on the phone is painfully slow (think Apple Watch 1), With the UI you can tell its rushed just by the fact that half of it looks modern and professional, yet icons any other things look cartoony. Just a software mess at the moment. Local music is a joke, not sure anyone actually pays for Pandora so I figured they should have gotten that right. This is going to be the first time I haven't had a fitbit on my wrist in like 5 years...

[JimboSlice001]

In my opinion, It feels rushed. Sleeker design, but very basic smartwatch like interface. I'm coming from a Blaze (which I sold to get the Ionic), so I was looking for a nice improvement over the Blaze, something improved to be on par with modern smartwatches while keeping the traditions of Fitbit staples, but instead it feels very similar to the Blaze, with the lack of apps at launch, plus the need for not one, but two paid subscriptions to enjoy the newest features. Looking at you Pandora Plus, and Fit Coach, which even if paid you currently cannot upload your workouts to the Ionic to be absolute cell phone free. 

My biggest issue by far is the very shotty WiFi downloading. It times out while transferring music, and it takes 30-60 minutes for 1GB of music, and 30-45 minutes to transfer Pandora stations. There has to be faster way to transfer data. Overall I am pleased with what Fibit does well, the exercise tracking and heart monitoring, but I could have kept my Blaze for that. My issues could easily be fixed with firmware updates, but for the price tag I was expecting more. I'm pure fitness orientated, so I never wanted an apple watch. Still don't, but the things I was looking forward to with this new Fitbit, so far are a letdown. Until these issues are fixed, I'd say wait and stick with the Blaze.