The FitBit Blaze - wait, why was this thing 250€?

by TZer0

I recently won a FitBit Blaze.

All in all: it is a practical piece of equipment as it measures your pulse, how many steps you've taken, how many stairs you've ascended, what APM you've got in Company of Heroes and it shows the time (wouldn't be a smart watch without that). It connects over bluetooth to your phone to store the data and allows some modification and tuning.

These things are working fine (mostly), but I'm kind of surprised by the number of flaws that I've found in a the few weeks I've had it.

In order from least annoying to most annoying according to myself:

  • Animations are slightly choppy on the device (very minor complaint).
  • I would've prefered that it was charged over micro-USB rather than in a proprietary cradle as I prefer open standards and not having to worry out the cradle breaking (unlikely).
  • I have no idea what the heart-symbol in this theme means (I tried measuring my pulse, nothing happened):

  • Some of the themes for the clock-display lack the functionality that other displays have. The one that I find most visually pleasing (pictured at the beginning of this post) shows how many steps you did in any given minute this hour (it could've shown it for the last hour, however: I'll take what I can get), but can't show the pulse. To see your current pulse you must click the left button, swipe left once and then tap the screen.
  • Sometimes the measured pulse is approximately double of what's actually the case.
  • Screen often turns on by itself (this is with the arm-lift detection function turned off).
  • This screen:

And there's no way to turn it off (I also got some e-mails that I unsubbed from).

  • Sometimes the clock starts vibrating after I've had a incoming phone call and there's no way to make it stop except for just waiting.
  • Except for the calls (that are bugged out), I've never received a notification on the FitBit.
  • No way to set the clock to 24-hour mode (and it doesn't say AM/PM on the screen, not that it would be hard to determine unless you're really drunk).
  • No clock-theme with all data visible (I don't care if it would look crowded, I'm a nerd and I love having all this visible on one screen).
  • The graphs are sort of hard to read:

You have to estimate what your heart rate was at any given time. This graph could've had one tick on the x-axis for each hour and more ticks on the y-axis showing heart rate. Again: no way to adjust it. Instead, you are forced to tap where you want to read the data with no way of dragging along the graph.

I simply don't get it. FitBit has released several smart watches so far, they're an established brand and yet they don't have things that I would consider standard functionality. The lack of the 24-hour clock is surprising to me as it is such a simple thing to implement.

Note: the price mentioned in the post title is what I saw on the piece of paper I had to sign while receiving it (2379 NOK - approximately 250€ and $280). Norway has generally quite high import taxes and higher prices in general - the price for this device is likely to be somewhat lower in other places.