Experience with the Inspire HR

[SteveLowe]

Sorry to be so non-specific and critical, but I thought someone needed to ask this.

Is the FitBit line a failed product that will never be adequately fixed the manufacturer?  Should I just throw away the one I have and buy some other brand, or is there still hope?

I bought a Fitbit Inspire HR about a year ago (summer 2019) looking for just some simple tracking: steps, heart rate, exercise timing and the like.  Nothing fancy.  But difficulty with Bluetooth pairing and syncing has been a constant hassle, and looking on the Community pages shows that many others are having the same problem. I gave up and stopped wearing the thing after a couple of months.  This summer (2020) I decided to revive it to track my walks, only to find the same problems, and I also found more repetitions of the same complaints on this message board.  And, yes, I did install the recent Inspire HR update, but no luck.

For my purposes, I would be happy to just sync the Inspire with the phone app (Samsung/Android) every couple of days.  Given my use, the FitBit has enough memory to store that much data onboard.  Also, Bluetooth burns up the battery on my phone so I really don't want to have it on all the time.  I was perfectly happy, every few days, to turn on Bluetooth, fire up the FitBit app, sync, turn off app and Bluetooth---that's what I did during my usage last year.  I could later browse my activity progress, sleep graphs, etc. at my leisure.

When it worked.  Sadly, very often the phone/FitBit would fail to sync right away.  Problem could usually be overcome---eventually.  Restart phone, restart FitBIt, try pairing and sync again, little arrow spins around for awhile, nothing.  Repeat.  Repeat again. Not how I want to spend my time between breakfast and brushing my teeth in the morning.

Now I am seeing that (1) FitBit is referring support inquiries to the Community boards, suggesting unnamed causes for insufficient costumer tech support capacity. And (2) some messages seem to indicate that the latest software updates expect that the user will use continuous syncing---exactly what I didn't want. It seems as though their software developers were able to do all the motion tracking stuff, but then just can't get the communications to work right.  And this situation seems to have persisted for a year.

Anyone have thoughts on this?   Does anyone know what the back story is with the company FitBit?

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[Odyssey13]

Hi @SteveLowe  new firmware has been announced today - click to read about it. 

Fitbit support is dealing with the same thing that other companies are right now and doing their best to take care of their customers. Pretty sure the "unnamed causes" would be related to the international pandemic caused by the coronavirus. Asking people to stop by the community forums has been helpful in many cases. For those who need more assistance, it's given, even though it might take additional time. What the backstory is with Fitbit is pretty much on the website. 

[SteveLowe]

Thank you for your reply.  Last week I updated the firmware on my Inspire HR, it is now at 1.63.5.  I see that the latest update, at the page to which you directed me, is 1.88.12. But the page there says it is a "progressive rollout" and will not be available to all users simultaneously, so I suppose I have to wait on that one. Do that 1.63.5 vs. 1.88.12 will make a difference with the sync? Is that something they addressed between those updates?  But I did see that there were a couple of releases in between 1.63.5 and the latest.  My FItBit app version, by the way, is 3.25, I think that is up-to-date.

Following your suggestion that more assistance is available through FitBit support, I am attempting contact and will just be patient about the additional time.

Thanks again for your help.