Feedback about Sense 2

[GMR555]

hi everyone, just wanted to share my opinions of my new Sense 2, and check if others feel the same or maybe realise if my unit has a problem or not.

as a long term charge owner (charge 2, charge 3 SE, charge 4 SE, charge 5 and luxes for my wife and niece) I was quite happy with the sleep tracking, auto detect of (my light) activities and notifications on my wrist. never really considered jumping to 'smartwatches' because of form factor and no real interested in the extra features. but I wanted to try it out, and bought the sense 2, and can compare the two:

sense 2 pros vs charge 5:

- more interesting watch faces..

- stress management capability ? that i am not really seeing its utility for until now

sense 2 minuses vs charge 5:

- slow interface, laggy experience while jumping from one screen to the other, while clicking buttons

- notifications take at least 3-4 seconds to load, you have to keep your wrist locked during this time otherwise screen will turn off

- battery drains faster

- alexa is useless to me, laggy to interact with and not useful for my use cases

basically I find myself trying to find reasons to like the sense 2, I admit it looks better than my charge 5 but that is it, for the rest my experience with the product is quite bad. 

is my unit possibly defective, or is the interface generally slow and unresponsive for the sense 2 ? 

example: when waking up every morning with the alarm, i turn my wrist and bring the watch in front of my eyes to click the button to acknowledge the alarm, the screen always turns off when doing it the first time. i have to wait for another second and click again on confirm to 'close' the alarm. during this time the person sleeping next to me hears the extra buzzing and hand gestures i am doing for the simplest thing in the world to do....

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[Tristannyc]

Sadly Google Knee capped the Sense 2 and Versa 4. Get the generation before for a better experience ALL AROUND. Sorry man 😞

This video sums it up really well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw280ix3Uzg 

Moderator Edit: Formatting

[dcrutherford]

I replaced my sense (went bad after getting it wet for less than 15 seconds) with the sense2.  I almost got the Google pixel, and wish I had.  This watch does the health tracking I used before, but no 3rd party apps?  The sense 2 cost more than my sense, but does less.  Don't buy this overpriced product.  Get the Google pixel watch or go back to the sense. 

[Killroy-TM]

Have been a happy user of the Versa 2 for years but the battery life started to become less and less until it lasted only like 16h and I had to put it for a short time on the charger before going to sleep. So I bought the Sense 2 for $300 gathered my experience with it for about 30 days and was totally disappointed. Some of the features that are important for others were not so much for me, BUT here are some of my biggest gripes.

/on Soapbox

The displaying of notifications is broken. They arrive, the buzzer goes off, and then nothing on the screen. You have to wake up the screen to now ONLY see the app icon that sent it and the sender and subject. Then wait several seconds and the whole message body will appear. Terrible compared to the Versa 2 which showed entire notifications instantly.

Next gripe, the navigation from screen to screen is slow and leggy, no idea where some of the reviewers got the idea that is was snappy. It may feel like that because the screens are looking like the wear OS ones, and maybe they were implemented by individuals that either wanted to further "Knee Cap" the Sense 2 or they were clueless apprentices of their trade.

The final nail in the coffin was when I received AFib notifications only to find out that the sensor didn't register the in depth sleep stages. Cleaned the underside of the watch and the wrist, the following night proper sleep stages were registered. But it was not a one off it happened again and again. This was NEVER the case with my Versa 2.

Finally, you are never sure if a none Fitbit clock face is the reason for any idiosyncrasies of behavior or not. If you don't like the Fitbit clock faces, you are stuck.

So, since I could return it within 45 days, the Sense 2 went back and I got a Sense 1. Notifications are instantly appearing, navigation is quick, only thing to check and wait for is, are the sleep stages registering overnight properly.

In summary the Sense 2 in its present stage is for me unusable. The link posted above to the YouTube rant about Google trying to bury Fitbit is feeling more and more like a reality because they want to draw attention to their crappy device called the Pixel Watch with less features and much less battery life then my old Versa 2. Maybe version 4 or 5 of the Pixel watch deserves a reevaluation but version 1 with Google having all the Fitbit know how presented us with a dumpster fire.

/off Soapbox

[Coolcat75]

It’s unbelievable. Why even launch sense 2?