Fitbit Surge – one month in

In December I started wearing a Fitbit surge (a work perk) and wanted to share my thoughts/experience.

• Steps seem largely accurate, although as you might expect it’s not so great at counting them when you’re pushing a pushchair! However, I have managed to achieve my steps target (7k per day) whilst;
  • walking up to bed
  • driving my car
  • cooking Christmas dinner
  • stirring my pasta
• Heart rate is *not* very accurate. Given this is something the Fitbit Surge is supposed to be very good at, and Fitbit advertise it as being accurate, it’s disappointing. I noticed it was reporting well below my actual bpm whilst on an excercise bike at the gym. It turns out, I’m not the only one – Fitbit are facing a class action lawsuit over it.
• Floors seems like a lot of nonsense to me. I don’t see how it’s accurate or useful.
• Battery life is woeful, compared to what Fitbit claim. It lasts about two days for me.
• I love that I can connect to my phone while playing music to see what’s playing, pause or skip tracks. However, I’ve had to stop using it because it massively drains the power.
• Tracking cycling works, for the most part, and the GPS seems accurate. GPS does drain the battery quickly though.
• Through the app you can choose from a number of different types of exercise to make available on the Fitbit Surge. However, it’s unclear what some of these are, or the difference between them and there is *no* documentation to explain it. I’ve read in forums, for example, that “spinning” and “workout” do the same thing.
• The vibrating alarm is nice at first but I find it all to easy to just ignore. If you ignore it, it stops and doesn’t do anything else other than leave the alarm display on. I’d expect it to, like my phone does, automatically snooze and keep on going until I turn it off.
• The app isn’t terrible intuitive. There’s a lot in it, and it’s kind of hard to know where to go. You get used to it, and once you do there’s a ton of info there. It’s the primary way to look at what you’ve been up to, and it gives you all the info you need.
• Being a cyclist I like to link it up to Strava and that works really well.
• I like that you can set a goal other than steps. Calories, for example.
• When I’m in my car, my phone connects to it via Bluetooth. But if I have the Fitbit connected to my phone the car can’t connect. It’s probably the car’s fault because the Bluetooth on that is crap, but it’s frustrating none the less.
• From the start I’ve had call and text notifications on so I can see from the Fitbit Surge who is calling or texting me. It’s never worked, but I just got it working a couple of days ago… :shrug:
• I’ve tracked exercise bike workouts as “spinning” and while the calories seems right, the steps don’t. For example, a 40 minute workout that burned 334 calories only added 25 steps and was classed as 32 active minutes. My heart rate was pretty accurate during that too.