Fitbit - Product Review

Well I bought a Fitbit. Mostly so I could compare it to the bodybugg which I also purchased. I will talk more about the bodybugg in a later blog post.

But the Fitbit, I bought it on Tuesday from Best Buy. On Thursday, it died. The display would not come on. I thought it might have been due to a low battery - even though the battery is suppose to last 5 to 7 days. But no. Even after leaving it charged up to the base overnight - still no display.

So I am going to talk about the day and 1/2, I did get to use it.

The Fitbit is tiny. It is design so it can be clip to your pants, shirt, etc. really anything that you can get the clip portion around. It comes with a charging base/station, a clip holder that gives you room to clip to bigger items, a wristband that you can clip the Fitbit to and of course the Fitbit itself.

One of the good and bad things about the Fitbit is that you don't realize you are wearing in. Once I had moved the Fitbit from my waist pant to my shirt and forgot. I thought I lost it.

Someone asked me "Does the Fitbit registered exercise using weights?" I am going to say not a lot. Although I didn't get to test this out a whole lot. I do know that on one of my sculpting/using dumbbell weights - exercise workouts, the Fitbit didn't register much of anything, whereas, the bodybugg register 266 calories.

The Fitbit tracks calories, steps, miles, and sleep. I was mostly concentrated on calories and for the most part, the Fitbit was inline with what the bodybugg was showing (taking into account my sculpting workout). The second day of wearing the Fitbit, I did a cardio only workout and throughout the day the Fitbit actually showed a higher calorie burn (about 85 calories) more than the bodybugg.

3/4 of the way through the second day, the Fitbit died.

The thing that was really cool about the Fitbit was that it captures your data and transmits it wirelessly to the website if you are in the vicinity of the station base. Loved that. There wasn't any taking it off and plugging it into your computer to upload your data.

You do however have to manually update what you ate. The web interface is decent. The feature that I liked about this is that when you go to add food not already in the database, it presents you with a Nutritional Facts label similar to what is on products. So you are able to track a variety of stats.

The feature that I wish the Fitbit had is a trip feature. A trip feature allows you to capture just a specific exercise session. I couldn't find this feature on the Fitbit.

All in all decent. 3 1/2 stars.