I've sold my Versa Lite yesterday after more than a month of usage to come back to my 3.5-years-old Pebble Time.
Hope sharing my feedback here would save somebody time and money.
Background: since my old Pebble Time's battery is slowly dying, I was in an active search for a dignified replacement.
Positive highlights first. Here's a list of the things that felt like an upgrade compared to Pebble Time:
- The device itself is more solid, the full-metal body feels great.
- Heartbeat tracker and fitness features are awesome. Loved the insights. Note that later Pebble 2 used to have a heartbeat monitor, but I have no clue how well it performed.
Now frustrating parts. The points are sorted from the most frustrating to the least frustrating/trivial ones.
- Totally broken music control. I have a compatible Pixel 3 phone. I somehow managed to connect my phone with the "Fitbit Classic" device or smth once during initial setup, it worked very poorly, I tried to reconnect and never succeeded, it lost the connection and never worked again. Basically, I couldn't control music from the watch. This is one of the main functions of the watch, I use it a lot on a Pebble, and it's a shame Fitbit couldn't figure it out and make as good as the Pebble's one.
- No smart alarms. Versa is so smart with sleep phases but can't figure out when I'm most certainly to be easily woken up. Pebble has this and it works flawlessly. TBH there's a 3rd-party app for that but of course, you have to keep it open during sleep.
- Blocking exercise screen. While in the active training mode, you receive notifications, but that's it. You can't minimize the app and do other stuff. You can't even bring notification panel from the top. My issue was that I need to use a timer for rest periods during a workout and it's simply impossible to do. I felt really stupid figuring out other ways to track resting periods while having a watch on my wrist. BTW this is an official answer from Fitbit that this is by design so don't expect any improvements in this field anytime soon.
- No calendar events insights. In Pebble, you've got a timeline UI where you can go into the future and see calendar events details. For Versa, there are several 3rd-party apps, but they all support only the default calendar while Pebble allows you to pick the ones you want to have on the watch.
- Since Fitbit doesn't really recognize other health services, there's no official Google Fit sync. Luckily, there's a 3rd-party app for this in Google Play.
- There's no such feature as connection lost vibration. Almost every major watch face for Pebble has this feature while only a couple Versa watch faces have this feature. But I believe this should be a built-in feature anyway.
- No always-on screen and poor gesture-based wake-up. Because Versa has an LCD display, it can't be on all the time. Unfortunately, gestures to wake it up are far from perfection. Regular time checking turns out to be a quest of making an accurate gesture with a second-long wait while the screen turns on. When you are laying horizontally, it becomes almost impossible to check the time with a gesture. I'd rather have dim colors of the e-paper screen of Pebble and 7 days of work.
All-in-all, I'm back to Pebble. If Fitbit fixes at least first three points, I could make a calendar app myself and probably bear the rest.
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