Earlier this year I decided to get into shape, and thought that one way to help would be to get a fitness tracker. I’ve ended up buying quite a few of them for many different reasons, so I thought I would write a kind of semi-review of the ones I have tried. This is not meant to be an objective review comparing different trackers and apps, just some of my experiences of actually using them.

Fitbit Charge 2

The first one I decided to get was the Fitbit Charge 2. I figured that as Fitbit was one of the biggest brands, it would be a safe bet regarding integration with other apps. The Charge 2 is the top of the line non smart-watch tracker from Fitbit, and as such pretty expensive, but on the other hand, all of the Fitbits are expensive. They pretty much all range from 80€ to 150€.

The Charge 2 has a moderately good battery life of around 4 to 6 days on one charge. As a downside it uses it’s own charging cable that is also a bit difficult to use. Sometimes you need to fiddle around with it to get it to work, but it’s never very difficult. You just need to check that it actually charges, otherwise you might wake up in the morning with an empty battery.

The heart-rate sensor on the Charge 2 is always active, meaning that it continuously measures the heart rate. However, it’s not very accurate. It’s decent enough for most purposes, and with these general purpose bands, it doesn’t matter if it’s occasionally up to 20 bpm off. But the bigger problem is that it sometimes, especially if worn in a non standard way (like having it in the pocket) starts reporting very high heart rates, sometimes for long periods of time. This will lead to reporting of hundreds of extra burned calories. This is a big problem when counting calories.

Another problem with the Fitbits are that American companies have very different standards on allergens in products. This means that for some inexplicable reason Fitbit has decided to save a few cents by using nickel in their products. The plastic straps also have stuff in it that can cause a lot of allergic reactions. Even though I’m not super sensitive to nickel, I got really bad rashes from the metal, and my skin got irritated from the plastic strap. I bought some cheap straps from AliExpress that fixed the strap problem, but the metal was still an issue. It doesn’t touch the skin in normal situations, but it still has enough contact to be problematic, especially if you want to do sleep tracking.

Fitbit Alta HR

My girlfriend wanted a smaller Fitbit, but with mostly the same capabilities, so she decided on the Alta HR. It is very similar in functionality to the Charge 2, but considerably smaller. It also for some reason have about 20% better battery life, I suspect that that is because it’s a newer model. It's missing a few advanced features that the Charge 2 has, like the phone GPS tracking, stair tracking, and some fitness evaluation functions. Neither device has a GPS, but if you have a Charge 2 the phones GPS can track workouts. This is obviously a software flag, so it's a bit irritating that they are trying to upsell on this, especially because they don't have a more expensive version in the same size that would have this feature.

But all in all, if you want to go with a Fitbit, and preferrably have checked that you can wear it without skin problems, I would actually recommend the Alta. The Charge 2 is quite a bit bigger, costs about 20€ more and has a few days shorter battery life.

Fitbit App

The Fitbit app is fairly good. It is the most feature rich of the tracker apps that I have tried. It has calorie tracking and basic diet functions. It features a product database for food items, but it doesn’t seem to have anything from the European market, and even though you can add your own items, that functionality is pretty basic, and as far as I know, you can’t share them with other users.

Fitbits works fairly well as general trackers, meaning that you just wear it and let the tracker and app take care of everything. It can automatically detect exercise periods and track how active you are daily. This is shown in the app, and it’s easy to follow your different goals. As such I do recommend Fitbits for people who, like me, are clueless to all the fitness things when starting. It will help you through most of it.

Where the app falls short is on the technical side. It is very buggy, even to the degree that it can be a problem regarding getting things done. The calorie tracker tends to reset values when you try to enter different portion sizes, sometimes without you noticing. This can lead to entering wrong values. I have no idea how they haven’t fixed this, but it makes the calorie tracking difficult to use, and as such you might not use it as much as you should. The app also have problems with date rollovers. If you have the app running when the date changes, the whole thing can go pretty bonkers.

And even though most other fitness apps can be linked to Fitbit, it doesn't support Google Fit. If this is a problem or not depends a lot on how you use it, but it does limit the possibilities quite a bit. Also some third party apps needs a premium version to link to Fitbit.

Changing the tracker

After about 3-4 months with the Fitbit Charge 2 I decided that I needed to change to something else. The skin problems meant that I needed to switch the arm I was wearing it on about 4 times a day, and I couldn't use it for sleep tracking. I also tended to wait to put it on until I left the house, which meant that I sometimes forgot it at home, and at best didn't count the full days activities. I also noticed that the buggy app resulted in less accurate calorie tracking because the whole experience was so frustrating. This could be fixed by using a third party app like MyFitnessPal, which I ended up using anyway.

Polar A370

When I initially got the Fitbit, the other alternative I was looking at was the A370. And when I decided to get another one I decided to buy it. I found it on a sale, so the price was similar to the Charge 2. There are big philosophical differences between the two trackers, but I will start with the more hardware focused differences. The A370 is slightly bigger than the Charge 2, it's pretty much the size of a smaller watch. The biggest downside of the A370 is the battery life. You can count on two days, and it can usually manage four, but it's not great. In addition, the charging is not very fast. It's not glacial either, but it's good to reserve an hour or two for charging. The upside is that it uses a normal micro-USB port, so you can charge it in different places without bringing the special cable. The A370 has a colour display that is much nicer than the Fitbits, but probably one of the reasons for the battery life. The screen is also touch screen, which makes a huge difference. The Charge 2 is quite annoying to navigate, so you tend not to use the functions on the tracker itself. The A370 has a fairly nice interface.

Another nice feature is that the A370 is waterproof, so you can swim with it. Why the Fitbit is only slightly splash-proof, meaning that it should handle sweat and some rain as well as washing your hands, is beyond me. It's not recommended to bring the A370 into the sauna, but swimming and showering should be fine. I haven't really tested this though.

The heart-rate monitor on the A370 is also quite different. It's not always on, but rather reads you pulse every 5 minutes or so. If you start a training session it turns on continuous mode. You can also notice a big difference in accuracy between the two trackers. The A370, while not medical grade, is generally very good. I have noticed that when you turn it on, it can sometimes start on a higher or lower reading, but it then adjusts itself, and it's not jumping around like the Fitbits does sometimes. This might be on account of better hardware or better software, but being a company that mainly makes heart-rate monitors, it's not that surprising that the Polar one is better.

The design of the A370 is using much less metal than the Fitbit, but I don't think it in any way feels cheaper. And for previously stated reasons, I'm very much in the camp of the less metal, the better. The band is similar to the one that comes with the Fitbit, I haven't had any problems with skin irritation, but the clasp and loop system is a bit annoying. It's very solid when you get it fastened, but it's difficult to fasten and to open.

The A370 has much more granular controls over it's operations. It can be turned off and on, can be switched into airplane mode so you can actually bring it on airplanes, and even turn it into a heart-rate monitor for other devices like threadmills that can use bluetooth monitors.

Polar Flow App

Here comes the biggest difference from the Fitbit ecosystem. The Polar Flow app is built with a completely different philosophy. Where the Fitbit app has lots of different activity goals, the Flow app combines everything into one goal that is displayed in precentage, and you can set it to one of three levels. The app is quite minimalistic, and the main display is a 24h time wheel that shows your activity and sleep level during the 24h period. You can get info about longer periods as well, and it shows a feed of past activities.

It doesn't really allow tracking of weight unless you buy Polars Balance scale for around 100€ that updates your app via bluetooth. I would not recommend getting this scale unless you find it for a lot cheaper. Obviously I can't really test out the Polar weight tracking without it, but I don't think it gives you anything that other apps like Google Fit doesn't. Which brings me to a very good thing about Polar Flow, it integrates with Google Fit. The built in integrations are MyFitnessPal, Strava, TrainingPeaks, Nike+ Run Club and Google Fit. It can also add results and targets to Google calendar. There are other apps that have their own Flow integrations as well, like Endomondo, but the important one is Google Fit.

Unfortunately the Google Fit integration is not perfect. It sends info about trainings and other activities, but I'm not sure about step counts, and it doesn't really seem to read anything from Fit, like weight or anything like that. My Fit and Flow apps constantly give different step counts for example, it's possible that Flow is sending it's steps to Fit, but it's hard to tell. Most of the time I'm wearing both my phone and the A370. Suffice to say that I was hoping for a bit better integration, but this is a still a lot better than Fitbit.

The goal tracking is very much a matter of taste. In the beginning I really liked the Fitbits many different goals, but you sort of fulfill a lot of them by accident, so after a while you aim for getting all of them. This can sometimes be annoying, especially when your steps are way over, but stairs are missing some, or something like that. In that way I like the Polars unified goal better, any activity gets you closer to the goal.

Xaomi Mi Band 2

As a bonus I will write a little bit about this one as well. I found it really cheap (25€) and got some for the kids. The reason I'm writing about it is just to get a bit of a different perspective on the trackers. This is abviously not a real competitor to either of the more expensive bands, but it technically does everything the others do, and it's also waterproof like the A370. The readings are less accurate, and the software is not quite on the standard of the others, but it's not a bad deal, even for the normal price of 40€, if you just want something simple. And the battery lasts for up to 20 days.

Conclusion

I don't really regret getting the Fitbit as my first tracker. Even though I had a lot of problems with it, I did lose quite a bit of weight while using it. But I also quite like the Polar that I use now, and I think it definately is the higher quality device of the two. And if you do proper training like running or similar, I would definately go with the A370. I feel that it's more suitable for people who know a bit what they are doing. My problem in the beginning was that I had no idea how many calories I burned during a day, or how much I should eat to lose weight. The Fitbit software will teach you about all that stuff. But this illustrates a quite common problem nowadays. Fitbit is quite a good concept, but it only works with their own trackers, that are overpriced and not very good quality regardless of how much you pay. Their software is quite buggy to the point of being difficult to use. And the integrations are not good, they depend 100% on that other services will create the link to Fitbit. They also have stupid age restrictions on their service, where under 18 year olds only can use it if they have one specific tracker model. Regardless of how much permission their parents give them.

Photo by Jenny Hill on Unsplash