Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had a Charge HR for about a year. Happily switched to the Alta HR when it came out. My wrist is 6.5” and I got a large. I wear it on the second smallest hole (with the Charge HR I’d worn it on the third smallest). I like the large because it can fit around my ankle if I want, and the extra strap fits across most of my under-wrist which I think looks good. STEPS: it does this just as well as the Charge HR HEART RATE: Does this just as well as the Charge HR. I run a few days a week and it gets the same readings. STAIRS: Doesn’t have this function, but I found it flaky in Charge HR and always got more stairs than I’d actually climbed for the day, so I don’t miss it. BATTERY: I had it set with “All-Day Sync” on and "Always Connected" off and the battery has lasted about 8 days. A little after the 6 day mark I started getting low battery warnings (I guess they start happening at 25%). I started getting nervous it would finally give out at the 8 day mark so I put it on the charger. I tried it with “Always Connected” on next and it lasted almost the same. I got the low battery warning earlier on the 6th day. By the 7th day I decided it was close enough and started charging again, so I'm not sure exactly how long it will take, but at least a week. ALARM: I like this better than Charge HR. The alarm goes and buzzes about four times. If you don’t do anything it stops and snoozes and goes again 9 minutes later. You have to tap it twice (or more, I usually bang on it a few times) to turn it off. Otherwise it just keeps automatically snoozing. I like that if I’ve decided I want to sleep a little longer I don’t have to do anything. SLEEP TRACKING: when set on “normal” was about the same as Charge HR. I tried it on “sensitive” for a few nights and I got big wide bars of “restless” and the tracker only counted the non-restless times as sleep, so even though I was sleeping for 6 hours, it only counted 2 hours as sleeping. I thought that was weird so I’ve had it set to “normal” since. Maybe this reading would be useful to someone, but I found it confusing. Five days after getting my Alta HR it started tracking “sleep stages”. This is cool, I like getting to see what stages I got at night. If you click on the chart it walks you through what the different stages are and what percentage of your sleep they made up. HOURLY ACTIVITY: It warns you ten minutes before the next hour if you haven’t had your 250 steps yet. I like this, I don’t always care to accomplish this throughout the day, but on the days that I do I used to get frustrated if I lost track of time at work and missed an hour since there’s no way to go back and get steps in so you just ruined getting 100%. I’m glad Alta reminds me. Sometimes instead of just walking around I stand up and shadow box - the punching counts as steps and my arms and torso get a workout and I get the elevated heart rate and I can get to 250 quicker. EXERCISE TRACKING: It can tell when I’m running, although like Charge HR it won’t know distances, just steps, heart rate, and calories. It doesn’t have the side button to start an exercise timer, but I never used that in the Charge so I don’t miss it. I have two other apps I use to track my runs, so I don’t care that much about how detailed the Fitbit tracks them. Although I did recently discover the fitbit phone app can track my runs if I start it at the beginning of the run (on the exercise screen click the stopwatch and go to the tracking tab: you can select the activity then click the play button. If it’s a run it uses the phone’s GPS to map the run). CALL/TEXT ALERT: I like getting the little buzz to let me know to check my phone. It displays a little of the text message, but not much. Which is fine, it’s usually enough to give me an idea of whether it’s something important or not.