Advantius
8 de marzo de 2021
5 stars overall, but there are things that you should know. **UPDATE**
Written in March 2021 - purchased in May 2020. I wear this fitbit almost every single day, even while I sleep.Pros:-The heart rate, step count, exercise detection, and calorie burn tracking features have been revolutionary for my awareness of and adherence to personal fitness. When combined with a calorie counting app, they make it relatively simple to make adjustments to stay on target for weight loss/maintenance/gain goals.-Heart rate tracking during exercise is great for adjusting your preferred level of challenge and knowing when you're really pushing your limits.-Hyper-comfortable. Having never worn a watch before, it took a very brief adjustment period before I simply didn't feel it on my arm anymore. Sometimes I have to feel or look to doublecheck that I actually have it on.-Sleep tracking is a great reality check for bad habits regarding sleep, giving you a decent ballpark of how much you ACTUALLY sleep (hint: you're probably sleeping less than you think). If I'm unusually tired, I can usually track it back to getting 6 hours of sleep multiple days in a row. No more throwing my hands up and assuming I'm just plagued by some soul-sucking fatigue monster.-Calorie tracker app integration makes it relatively simple to deduct your calorie output (metabolism+activity) from your calorie input (food).-Battery life is fantastic. Wearing it all day nearly every day and checking it off and on, I can go more than a week before having to charge it. The idea of having to charge my high-falutin' Apple watch every single day just sounds strange and obnoxious to me now, so, it's probably ruined the concept of full-blown smart watches for me.-Resting heart rate information is an interesting fitness metric to watch rise and fall as you fall in an out of exercise patterns. After I hadn't been working out for a few months and then got covid-19, my resting heart rate had managed to creep from 54 bpm to 66 bpm. A couple weeks into a new exercise program and it's back in the 50's.-Durable.-Easy to clean.-Never used a screen protector and the screen has held up great.Cons:-Heart rate tracker is not always reliable, even when placed on your arm exactly as directed by the instructions. My favorite is when I can stick my finger to my neck and count off a heart rate around 130 bpm and my watch is telling me that my heart rate is EXACTLY, UNERRINGLY 84 bpm. There's absolutely nothing I can do except wait for it to take its sweet time to start tracking my actual heart rate. I feel like its accuracy was a lot better when I first bought it and not even a year later I'm starting to have serious issues with inconsistency.-Battery performance is just beginning to degrade at 10 months. When I charge it to 100%, as soon as I take it off the charger it will then drop to around 90%. Battery life is still great, but I'll wager I get another 6-ish months before it starts to be a real problem. That would line up with it having a 1-year warranty.-Doesn't sync smoothly with every food tracking app. I have to Force Sync it (basically a one-time manual sync) to the LoseIt app every time I want to factor my latest steps or exercise against my calorie intake.-Online integration. The app apparently stores your data online instead of locally, so if you try to scroll down into your historical data, it has to download it. It sure is fun, sitting there looking at a blank heart rate chart as it chugs along trying to download all your data on a crappy signal. Exactly how much storage space would it cost to just keep a local copy on my phone, anyway? 10MB? Fitbit, please.-Premium ads. Fitbit watches are vehicles for selling you a subscription service. They will poke and prod and remind and ask and notify you until you pay up. "Try the trial!" they implore you... every single day. Good God. Imagine buying one of the $200 fitbits and have it basically beg you to buy premium the entire time you have it.That said, I absolutely do not regret anything about this purchase. Overall, it's been fantastically useful. As a data-driven person I find that its informative value empowers me to control my fitness level with enhanced accuracy and motivation.**UPDATE**It's now May 2024 and I've learned a lot about these devices. When I initially bought the Inspire HR, I expected absolutely perfect heart rate tracking, and that's not what I actually received, so I gave the Inspire HR to my wife and ended up trying a couple more FitBit products, the Inspire 2 (functionally the same as the Inspire HR), and the Charge 5 (basically a higher-end/sturdier version of the Inspire line). I also received a free Polar Vantage M ($270 fitness tracker) from my employer and tried that out. Here's what you need to know:-Four years later, the Inspire HR I purchased on Amazon is still working despite constant use.-DO NOT LET THE BATTERY STAY DEAD. It has an extremely long life, but if you put it in a drawer and forget about it for months, the battery will not work the same when you pull it back out again.-Tightening the band (a lot) during cardio seems to help with heart rate accuracy. This is true of all of the optical heart rate monitors.-Optical heart rate monitors just plain CAN'T handle sudden heart rate bursts - they seem to use a sort of long-interval averaging, which means they take a minute to catch up to sudden changes, and they'll never be as accurate as electrical heart monitors. But for an inexpensive consumer-grade device, I'm satisfied with its capabilities. If you need every single beat perfectly accounted for, then you need an ELECTRICAL heart rate monitor - preferably a chest strap. That's pretty overkill for most general fitness enthusiasts or people seeking to be more active.-FitBit probably overestimates your steps and calorie burn by 10-20%. The more you move, the bigger the gap. Be wary of basing dietary decisions on its estimates. Its projections are better for analyzing your overall physical activity trend.-FitBit's device integration and data syncing capabilities make Polar look stuck in 2005. It took days of re-attempts over multiple months to get my Polar watch to even pair to my phone, only to eventually discover that Polar's software is essentially useless for what I need. The Polar Vantage M is a $270 device; that it's getting dominated in ease of use and data accessibility by a $60 plastic FitBit is inexcusible. I have a massively increased respect for the Inspire HR, Inspire 2, and Charge 5 after my experience with Polar.Four years later, I have no regrets and wholly endorse FitBit's non-smart fitness watch lines.Ver másVer menos
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