I received my Fitbit Sense last Sunday (it is Saturday early afternoon right now). I have been using it fairly heavily (for me) for the last week. Previously I have used two Fitbit Ionic's sadly both of them broke at about the one year mark, and then a Galaxy watch active 2.
My general takeaway is that I would probably have been happy with the versa 3, but I am curious to see what the ECG feature does when it is enabled. Hopefully that will be soon. The EDA sensor works well enough, but for me it doesn't provide much in the way of usable or actionable information. As far as I can tell those are the only two function not available on the Versa 3.
As compared to the ionic, the sense seems to be working night and day above it. The ionic when it worked was great, however getting updates on to the ionic was painful. I generally had to make several attempts and it took the better part of a day. This included first starting up both of the two ionic’s that I had.
In comparison the Fitbit sense worked straight out of the box, it connected to my phone on the Fitbit app easily, the update uploaded and transferred on the first try and I was wearing and using the Fitbit sense within 30 minutes of opening it. I did have one hick up. When I initially loaded the SpO2 watch face (which you must use while sleeping to get your SpO2 information recorded) it did not display properly. I ended up having to remove the watch face from the Fitbit sense, fill up all five of the available watch faces with different options. Restart the watch, restart my phone and then reload the SpO2 watch face period from then on it has worked fine.
Fitbit continues to have good and accurate step counts for me, similarly the heart rate monitor seems fairly on point, and the sleep data is excellent and seamless. The sleep tracking feature is one of the main reasons I keep coming back to Fitbit.
The smartwatch features on the sense are night day above the ionic. The notifications that I got on my Fitbit ionic were spotty at best and more often than not notifications did not come through. The Galaxy watch active 2 was much better in this respect, however as a fitness tracker The Galaxy active 2 seemed more like an expensive toy rather than a tool that actually helped motivate me to exercise. For me the fact that Fitbit syncs with Weight Watchers is a huge plus that was missing on the Galaxy active 2.
Fitbit has also implemented a find my phone feature on the watch which I really appreciate, as I am always misplacing my phone around the house. This was the only feature on the Galaxy watch active that I thought I was going to lose. It was a pleasant surprise to see that it had been implemented.
As to battery life, the Fitbit sense seems to be performing as I expected. They advertise a six day battery life, which I could probably make happen if I was very judicious about the use of the watch. As it stands, I used to watch without holding back at all for 4 days (96 hours almost to the minute) which took me down to 18% battery. It charged from 18% to 52% in about 15 minutes, and 30 minutes later it was at 98%. The four days of use included a lot of playing on the watch, lots of fussing with watch faces, a moderate number of notifications (texts, emails & phone calls) and working out every day. I use the SpO2 watch face while I was sleeping. I started this on my second night with the Fitbit sense. I did notice a little bump in battery usage when I started using this watch face but not enough to make me switch. I should note that my workouts were all at home, so there was no GPS usage. I also do not use Alexa so I have no idea how that would affect battery life. I'm looking forward to when Google Assistant is up and running on the Fitbit sense. We will have to see what it does to the battery.
I suspect I'm going to go back to my practice with the ionic of charging the watch every time I shower which generally kept my battery with plenty of charge to spare. I almost never had my ionic run out of battery. As opposed to my Galaxy watch active 2 which was always needing to be charged.
Please feel free to share your experience with the new Fitbit.
Enjoy
