New Surge and my first impressions

[HeliosJim]

My new Surge arrived before 10:00AM today (gotta love Amazon Prime Sunday delivery!) and of course it had my full attention. It came about half charged, which I am sure is normal. I ordered a large in black. It was packaged nicely, and it was easy to install the Fitbit app and connect the Surge to the app. I had to plug the Surge into my computer in order to update it, since the app said the battery was too low to proceed. No problem there.

My first thought is that I could have ordered a small and saved $50! Even if I wear this up my arm a bit there is plenty of left over strap. Maybe I'll return it and order a small, but I doubt I'll bother.

Second, I noticed that the charge cable was tricky to get plugged in and seemed to keep falling out. When I showered later, I plugged it into a wall charger and had the same issue. I think if I get it plugged in correctly it will stay put, but this could be better designed. A magnetic coupler like the Pebble smarwatch or the Jawbone UP3 have would have been a better choice. A micro USB would be ideal, but I expect that might be hard to keep water tight.

Next, it said I had alrady burned in excess of 700 calories for the day. I suspect this is because I created my Fitbit account on this web site yesterday, and I'm guessing it was estimating my BMR from weight and age and gender, and reporting consumed calories accordingly. I suspose it has to be able to estimate calorie burn when its not being worn, but I hope it uses emperical data when it is being worn.

Next, it seems to slide down my arm as I wear it. Like most people my arm narrows closer to the wrist, and I saw I'm supposed to wear this about one finger width above the bone on my wrist. It keeps sliding down to the wrist bone. I'm not sure that's an issue, but who knows.

I'm still experiemnting with how tightly I should wear it. I suspect tight enough so it stays put but not so tight it cuts off the blood flow.

I did 60 minutes of eliptical while wearing it, and I sweat like crazy. It recorded 571 calories burned and also displayed my heart rate constantly, which I really, really liked. I didn't check my pulse manually to see if it was accurate, although I'll get to that. When I did all this I moved it up my arm a bit.

Its nearly 8:30 now, and I have not hit my 10,000 step goal. I have only 8,341 thus far, and many of those were from my eliptical workout this morning. It also reports only 3 flights of stairs, which is probably true. We'll see if I can get 10,000 steps in, but at work I'll probably get the 10 flights of stairs. I need to climb 2 flights to get from the first to the second floor, and I never use the elevator.

I like the text message notices! I wore my pebble smartwatch just for thst feaature, so the watch is getting retired if I keep the surge.

I'm in the northeast so trying out the GPS with a run or a bike ride may have to wait a but. I hate the cold!

That's it for now, I'm sure I'll have many questions this week.

Happy New Year all!

[AngelaMa]

Hello @HeliosJim, welcome to the Fitbit Family! It's great to have you here. 🙂 Thanks for sharing your experience with the Surge, you are right about the BMR it is all explained on the help article: How does Fitbit estimate how many calories I've burned?. On the Heart rate FAQs you can get some tips on wearing your tracker. You can also refer to the Surge product manual for any inquiry regarding your tracker's functionality. 

Thanks for stopping by, see you around!