Fitbit Blaze: 5 things before buying

Fitbit has been dominating the fitness wearable market for awhile now, but their wearable devices haven’t exactly been the best looking ones. Sure, the Charge HR and Alta are pretty sleek and minimalistic, but what if you wanted a big screen?

In the past, you would have been relegated to the Fitbit Surge, but that costs a pretty penny and, frankly, is anything but pretty. Chunky would probably be the best description. Well, now you have another option, meet Fitbit’s most stylish wearable yet — the Blaze.

Now the Blaze isn’t here to replace the Surge. In fact, Fitbit places it right between the Charge HR and Surge. As a result, the Blaze feels a little like some features were intentionally left out just so it wouldn’t compete with their flagship wearable.

The good news is that this is still a Fitbit device at its core. That means, you get all the awesome access to what is arguably Fitbit’s biggest asset — its ecosystem. The Blaze will sync up with your Fitbit app like any other of the devices in their line. You can then share your fitness stats with your friends, get detailed information like calories burnt, food intake, water intake and sleep among others.

Fitbit’s Blaze is also pretty well rounded in terms of fitness tracking. It’s got support for a variety of exercises like biking, running, weights, treadmill and several others. In addition. It has automatic exercise recognition where the watch will automatically detect if you’ve been in exercising and record it down without you needing to do anything.

That’s pretty cool if I’m being honest and is something I really like especially coming from the Moto 360 Sport. The Blaze also has features like active heart rate monitoring, elevation detection, auto sleep detection and tracking, alongside the usual step counting.

It’ll also do notifications, but I turned that off immediately because it annoyed me more than anything. The notifications appear from the bottom without providing much information and would often alert me of unnecessary things like the fact that WhatsApp was backing up my chat history to the cloud. That said, I could be spoilt by how well Android Wear delivers notifications so user experience here could differ.

If you’re someone who has never owned a Fitbit device before and want to know if you should start with the Blaze, or if you’re thinking of upgrading from something like a Charge HR, here are five things you should know before buying.
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1. It has no built-in GPS

Do you see what I mean by it feeling like Fitbit intentionally leaves some features out of the Blaze so it doesn’t compete with the Surge?

The Blaze does have something called connected GPS which utilises your smartphone’s GPS instead of the one on a watch. However, that means you will have to carry a smartphone around with you on your exercises.

I personally am not big fan of that especially when I’m using a large smartphone, but I do know some of you listen to music on your smartphone during workout sessions. I keep a 512MB pendrive-shaped MP3 player for such purposes. Dinosaur tech, I know, but it’s tiny.

2. It doesn’t have the best display out there

One of the Blaze’s selling points is its relatively large colour display — a first for the company. In terms of brightness, vibrance and resolution, the Blaze has a pretty nice display. Fitbit also takes advantage of this by giving it a whole host of features like FitStar integration which gives you a bunch of exercises (10 min workout, 7 min workout, etc) that are complete with a GIF-like image showing you how the exercise should be done.

Unfortunately, when I started swiping through the menu and/or pulling down the notifications, everything seemed rather laggy. Doing it slowly, the animations move smoothly so it probably isn’t the watch’s performance. We think it’s that the display has a relatively low refresh rate so movements appear choppy instead of buttery.

It’s also got massive bezels. At a glance, it looks like there is more bezel than display.

3. It’s definitely a looker

Nonetheless, this is a beautiful looking watch. If you get it in black, the thing oozes style. Sure, it may be an acquired taste for some, but I think it’s by far the best looking Fitbit device out there. The frame and strap are also really sturdy and feel pretty premium on your wrist. The main device itself leaves a lot to be desired however.

Its straps are also removable so you can swap them out if you damage or tear it. The device is also waterproof, but it isn’t recommended that you go swimming with it.

4. It has great battery life…

Fitbit says their Blaze can last up to five days on a single charge and I can totally vouch for that. I’ve even gotten it to last beyond five days in the past, but that was one occasion. On average, you should be getting around five days per charge.

5. …but it charges really stupidly

I’m not kidding when I say that this watch has one of the dumbest charging mechanisms I’ve ever seen. You don’t just hook it up to a power source with a cable, oh no. Instead you have to pop the middle bit out and place it in this flimsy-plasticky-frame-holder-thingamajig that Fitbit includes with the Blaze out of the box.

Fitbit, come on. What on earth happened here? Wouldn’t a magnetic cable have worked just fine?

The bottom line

The one thing you have to keep in mind when purchasing the Fitbit Blaze is that this isn’t a full-fledged smartwatch. It’s a smart fitness watch so it isn’t in the same league as an Apple Watch, Moto 360 or Samsung Gear S2. It’s geared more towards fitness and the fitness enthusiast.

With that in mind, as a whole, I think the Blaze is a pretty decent device by itself but it’s a little out of place. It definitely isn’t cheap, priced at RM950. But it is much cheaper than the RM1,280 Surge.

If you’re someone who has never used a Fitbit device before and want to enter the ecosystem plus have a nice screen, then I think the Blaze is a pretty good option. For all it’s faults, I do quite like this device. It’s light, it looks good, and tracks fitness as well as any Fitbit device besides the Surge.

But if you already own a Charge HR and want to upgrade, I don’t think the jump is big enough to justify spending close to RM1,000 just to get notifications, music controls and multi-sport support.