After being a Fitbit customer for 6 years, I am finally saying good bye.
My Fitbit journey started with Charge HR in 2016. Then I purchased Charge HR2 in 2017 and subsequently Versa in 2019. My Versa went dead all of a sudden in July 2022, after a smooth journey of 3 years. I decided to purchase Sense, assuming that this product would be stable now, packed with all the latest features. This watch's price makes it a luxury product and I was expecting it to work flawlessly.
Unfortunately, there was a problem with the basic functioning of the device. The heart rate measurements were too much inaccurate to ignore. I reported this issue on the following thread:
https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Sense/During-exercise-sense-reports-highly-inaccurate-heart-rates/m-...
There was not a single official comment from Fitbit. I search the community forum and realised that this was a hardware issue, reported by many users. Fitbit has acknowledged it but failed to provide any solution even after 1.5 years of reporting.
I called up their customer care, who also confirmed that Fitbit is aware of this issue and may provide a fix in future. Later I found an update on one of the community threads, from Fitbit saying that they will not be able to provide any fix for this issue.
Apart from inaccurate HR, other features of Sense have been implemented in a senseless fashion. For example, SpO2 is measured only if you wear this watch to sleep. I am not comfortable wearing a watch during sleep. So, this feature doesn't work for me.
For other features like ECG, you need to have Fitbit premium subscription. Even after paying a premium price for this watch, I had to pay again for a subscription to use the ECG feature. This is ridiculous!
The Sense strap got broken after a month of use, which thankfully got replaced by Fitbit.
Another limitation of this watch is that it allows you to enable only one app to send mobile notifications at a time. You can get notifications pushed to watch either from SMS or WhatsApp or some other app but not all.
Practically, the only benefit of Sense to me was that I was tracking my steps. But this could have been achieved by any other fitness tracker in the market, at 10% of the cost of Fitbit Sense.
I was able to sell the INR 23000 Sense at a price of INR 10000, in three months of use. That is really sad because there is no market for pre-owned Fitbit watches in India. As I mentioned, other fitness trackers are available at fraction of the cost, so people don't bother paying such a high price for the same set of features. Luckily, the price of the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 has dropped a lot and I purchased a new one at INR 9000.
I am loving the user experience of this new watch for the last week. I now feel that I have leapt from one generation of fitness watches to the next.
- I can receive and respond to all the mobile notifications pushed on my watch now
- All the measurements of this watch are real-time (no need to sleep to track SpO2)
- The watch screen is big and comfortable to see all the metrics
- The watch faces are dynamic, better in design and appear more professional as compared to Fitbit ones
- Customisation is of the next level. You can move around and reorder almost everything. Watch faces also have lots of customisation.
- The OS is way more powerful. I was amazed to see youtube running on the watch. You can even launch mobile's camera from the watch, view the camera feed and click pics from the watch itself.
- Supports 90+ workout modes with customisations
- HR measurement is accurate (this matters to me)
There are many more features which I haven't used yet. Have mentioned just those, which I have come across and feel that they are significant improvements over Sense.
But there are couple of things from Sense that I miss:
- My friend circle
- Battery life of 5 days
There are also a couple of features in Galaxy Watch 4, which are not enabled in India. These are ECG and BP measurements. But there are workarounds to enable them.
Charging this watch daily is not really an issue for me because I don't wear it 24/7.
In the end, I would like to thank Fitbit for being part of my life over the last 6 years. If you guys innovate and build some great watch in future, I may switch back 😉
Fitbit user since 2016: Charge HR, Charge HR2, Versa, Sense
