Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've been a Fitbit user for 2 years now and have convinced several people to buy Fitbits and join my social fitness group. The new Fitbit Ultra is a small upgrade over the old Fitbit, and as such, doesn't warrant replacing your old Fitbit with the Ultra version. However, the Ultra is still a 5-star product when used properly. Even if you already have a heart rate monitor and a GPS unit, the Fitbit can become the center of your active world. I'll start by saying that no one "needs" a Fitbit. It is a luxury item. If you're active, and goto the gym on a regular basis, and do a decent job watching what you eat, this device might not seem useful. I've also had plenty of people defiantly tell me that they just need a cheap pedometer that costs 1/10th the price of a Fitbit plus a journal and they can get the same functionality. To a degree, these statements are all true. The power of the Fitbit resides in its simplicity and social networking, but it's very hard to fully appreciate without using the device for two weeks. Once you understand what the Fitbit provides, though, you can never go back. INSTALLATION There are minimal instructions included with the Fitbit. Luckily the install is rather simple. Goto the Fitbit website, create a user name and login for yourself, download and install the driver, plug in the USB charging stand and you should be ready. You'll have to place your Fitbit onto the charger when prompted in order to obtain a pin number that identifies your Fitbit with your user name, but the entire process only takes about 5 minutes. HARDWARE The Fitbit Ultra looks and feels the same as the original `bit (you can get the plum accent color, though). There is only 1 button on the device and a small OLED screen. The screen has a sharp, attractive blue hue and is bright enough to read in all conditions except broad daylight. The button is nothing fancy, but has a solid enough click for my taste. I guess you can say that the Fitbit has a hinge, but it only opens a few degrees, which is sufficient to clip the device directly onto a bra strap or that little coin pocket on a pair a of jeans. A belt clip attachment is included to situate the Fitbit on belts of most thicknesses. There is also a USB charging stand that doubles as the wireless data base and a soft wrist strap for wearing your tracker while you sleep. The Fitbit is durable, but the one thing it cannot handle is water. Obviously, you can't swim with it, but I've had friends of mine wear their `bits in their bra strap underneath a shirt and fleece on a cool fall day, work up a sweat, and have their Fitbits die due to the highly humid environment within their shirt. Its fine during a gym workout, just be careful if you're keeping it contained in a non-breathable location while sweating. PERFORMANCE At its core, yes, the Fitbit is an expensive pedometer--but a highly accurate one. I've counted 150 steps in my head many times and it was spot-on. I've used a PreCor elliptical that told me I went 2873 steps and the Fitbit told me I went 2870. That's quality. Distance accuracy can get close to 5% error, but only if you calibrate your walking and running stride lengths in your profile settings (calibrate by measuring off 50 feet, walk the 50 feet and count the # of steps, divide the 600 inches by your number of walking steps. Repeat 2 more times and take the average. Do the same for running). Otherwise your distance can be off by 20%. The Ultra's main difference from the previous model is that it keeps track of flights of stairs. In a 3 step ranch house, walking up and down the 3 steps 8 times in a 5 minute period didn't seem to register as a flight or two. However, when I've gone up 5 consecutive flights all at once it does seem to be pretty accurate. As long as you keep the Fitbit clipped to your waist/pocket areas or bra strap, it seems to be good. The Ultra also has a stopwatch function, but looking down to my waist, hitting the button and trying to see the timer wasn't really practical during a run. Just wear a watch instead. Finally, the sleep tracking works well, but I find it to be a bit of an annoyance. If you want to wear the soft wrist strap and keep track of your sleep efficiency, it will definitely help you. But after 2 weeks I found that I was such a sound sleeper that I didn't want to deal with the 2 minutes of set up time to find the wrist strap and put it on. Instead, I now just start the sleep timer when I crawl in bed and put the Fitbit on my nightstand. When I wake up, I hit stop. This way it still gives me a very good idea of how many hours I'm sleeping per night. It's helped me realize that if I average under 6.25-6.5 hours of sleep per day for a week, I feel awful, but if I'm over that mark, I perform better during the day. WEBSITE Simply sitting near the wireless base while your computer is on will upload the data from your Fitbit (it takes seconds to upload all data) for analysis into 5-minute, binned increments. Meaning, it keeps track of all the steps you take from 7:30-7:35 and then 7:35-7:40, and so on...for 24 hrs a day, up to 7 days. You do not need to charge the Fitbit on the base for it to transfer data. My battery lasts about 6-7 days with normal use, and I only have to leave it on the charger for 30 minutes to go from low battery to full. Once the data are uploaded to the website (it all happens automatically, you don't have to hit any upload buttons), they are ready to be analyzed. There is a lot of data to mine through, but the website is well organized and very accessible. Just by looking at your day's 5-minute bins, you can essentially identify where you walked from the parking garage to your office, where you walked to the far conference room, how many times you walked to the bathroom, etc. For me, once I saw my sedentary daily life, the Fitbit helped me break my lazy habits. Once you're keeping track of your life stats, anyone with a shred of competitiveness will want to improve on them. The Fitbit drives you to walk to the far bathroom instead of the once close to your desk. When you get home from work and see that you only have 5000 steps it compels you to goto the gym for 5000 more, especially if you see that you've only been averaging 7,000 steps a day for the past two weeks. The final incentive for getting a Fitbit is for the social aspects. I'm not a social website kinda guy, but here is an example where the social connections make sense. You can invite friends to your profile, and depending on everyones' privacy settings, you can see their daily stats. The website even makes a comprehensive leaderboard section where you can compare yourself to your friends and the Fitbit community as a whole. The company has also redesigned the website several times in the past 2 years. Now you can track your lifetime steps (I have over 3.5 million so far), flights, and distance. There are badges that you can earn (think achievements for xbox games) for goals such as 10,000 step days. The site also keeps track of manually inputted data. I enter my weight every day and it has kept those numbers for over a year. It's much more valuable, and powerful, to see your weight loss over the course of months and years instead of just day-to-day. And it is all automatically graphed for you after you enter the numbers. There are tracking tabs for glucose, heart rate, blood pressure, and custom categories that you can create. The final tracking option is food, and it is incredibly comprehensive. The website has a huge log of foods and their calorie contents, just start typing "hamburger," and options for generic hamburgers, McDonald's, Bob Evans, Wendy's, In-N-Out and LOTS more will appear from a drop down list. You can create favorites for 1-click logging, which is convenient if you have the same bag lunch a couple times a week. It does take awhile to log everything here, so I rarely use the food track feature, but it very much there if you want to take advantage of it. CONCLUSION You don't need to get a Fitbit. It is a toy, a gadget, a luxury. However, it does its job extremely well. You still need to have the right mindset to use the device, though. If you've NEVER worked out and have no interest in doing so, this device won't yell at you like a personal trainer will. But if you have some motivation, even a weak kindling fire, and perhaps need to be a little bit more efficient to get you moving more and more, the Fitbit will definitely help. Even more so if you have friends with Fitbits so you can challenge yourselves on the leaderboards. Once you get used to mindlessly putting it on everyday like I have, it simply becomes part of your life. Tracking your stats for your life is incredibly helpful and cannot fully be appreciated until you wear this device for 2 weeks. After those two weeks, try giving this little gadget up...I doubt anyone will be able to unclip it from your jeans coin pocket without a fight. I hope this review was helpful if you've been on the fence about buying one, but overall I feel like this is a 5-star product.