Well, I've had a full year of using my Versa, and my conclusion is that while it is a very good fitness tracker, it is not a good smartwatch and I'm giving up on it.
I've been wearing watches of varying degrees of smartness since 2005 so I feel like I'm fairly well placed to have an opinion on this. I have no particular illusions that anyone would actually be interested in my opinion and, since I'll no longer be a customer, I have no illusions that Fitbit would care about my perspective.
However! There are some things I want to get off my chest, so here is my exit interview: all the things that consistently annoyed me to the point that I don't want to use this device any more.
- Lack of an always-on screen. A core function of a watch is being able to read the time. Versa fails in this regard too often. Every time I tilt the watch toward myself and the screen doesn't come on, so that I have to flip it away and back again, or give it the little double tap, it makes me sad. When I try read the time lying in bed, the auto tilt won't work. Try to read the time while carrying something in both hands? Can't do it.
- Versa is not "connection-focused", by which I mean - it does not try primarily to be 'connected' to my phone, it tries primarily to sync with my phone. That is probably fine for a fitness tracker, which just needs to occasionally share its data with the fitbit app, but it's bad for a smartwatch. A smartwatch needs to be connected to my phone, and if it isn't, it needs to notice and reconnect. And if it can't do that it needs to notice and tell me so that I can deal with it. Versa doesn't care about being connected, and I've lost count of the times when I noticed my phone buzz, saw that the watch did nothing, opened the fitbit app and saw that it hadn't synced for a long time. Does a recent sync mean that it is connected? No! That's just the main way you can guess if it's connected because neither the phone app or watch will tell you.
- NFC payment checking when I haven't asked it to. Here's a good use case: I want to use fitbit pay, so I set the phone into pay mode, enter password, touch the watch to a pay sensor. That would be just fine as the only way to use payments. However, the Versa also does a thing where it detects an NFC signal and prompts me to enter my password. That gets set off by some store security gates, new nyc mta turnstiles, and sometimes my phone. And you can't turn it off.
- A touchscreen is not a good interface if you are running. Or if your hands are wet. Or if you are swimming. Or if you cross your arms and your other arm registers as a touch.
Also; I did stick with this for a year. Some things I think are good:
- Square screen. All the WearOS watches look nuts to me. There's no reason for a digital watch to be circular and it's a much more sensible use of screen real estate to use a rectangle if you display text.
- Battery life is good enough. I don't want to charge a watch daily, weekly is fine.
- To the extent that it tries to be a smart watch, it is as a phone companion. Personally, I just bring my phone along, so I don't need a watch to be a standalone entity.
- Sleep and activity tracking is good.
So what's next? Well, I've found a Pebble 2 on ebay and I'm going back to that. Maybe that immediately flags me as a crank, but as a person who wants a smartwatch, not as a fashion item or a status symbol, but as an actually useful device, I believe that 3-year-old, community supported watch is the best thing currently on the market.
