Gadgetory

Fitbit has returned and is looking to make their fitness tracker a little bit more like a SmartWatch it's Josh avatar from Android thority what's going on everybody and this is the Fitbit blaze now it's important to note that we also have a full written review that has been on Android 30.com for a few days now written by Jimmy westenberg and the reason why that's important is because Jimmy is more of a distance and endurance runner so that is where his opinions are going to be in terms of the Fitbit blaze that I have on my wrist right here I on the other hand and more of a free weights person so I brought this over to the gym and my opinions are going to be based on that so make sure you head on over to Android or decom for even more comprehensive thoughts on the Fitbit blaze in terms of design the Fitbit blaze is actually kind of attractive it is a combination of two different peripherals first you have the frame that the actual device will go into and then the device itself is a small squarish piece of kit now it has a 1.25 inch of screen on the front at 240 by 180 resolution and of course you have the heart rate monitor on the back that will always be firing when it is on your wrist customization is possible here as the different wrist bands and the frame itself can be bought with different materials for example leather if you want it to be a little bit more catering to your style and then switching between the two is a matter of just snapping out the device itself and then putting it into the other frame the Fitbit blaze does do a pretty good job of adapting to whatever style it is put on however it is still pretty obviously a digital watch and fitness tracker so it's not necessarily as fashionable as other let's say Android wear watches or even analog watches of the sort one little caveat that I had about the device one put into the frame is that you have to fit it in just perfectly if you have the frame right here you have the two buttons on the Wrights using pins on the frame that will push into those buttons and then one over on the left one issue that I had is that I didn't have the device seated just perfectly in the frame so this button over on the left actually needed to be pushed even harder and it was a little bit uncomfortable it has to be seated just right into the frame or else the device might not get triggered with its buttons the screen like I said is 1.25 inches and mostly it's alright the screen does have a large bezel around it so the device does have more beds than it should and its sensitivity in terms of touch is not necessarily where you would expect it to be especially when compared to other smartwatches connecting the Fitbit blaze to a smartphone is really easy you just have to have the app on your smart phone and then it will connect to the watch through a simple pairing mode of the functions include a timer and a stopwatch and also an alarms feature this alarm feature is supposed to wake you up silently by just using the vibrations in the device now while that is a really good idea I found that the vibration was actually too weak to wake me up in the morning and even then you have to rely on the smartphone app in order to create and edit alarms not to mention it is a little bit annoying that when you make the alarms you have to sync the device every single time now the battery in the Fitbit blaze is one that's supposed to go for about five days and for the most part that was the case Jimmy was able to use it for five days straight and it pretty much corroborated what Fitbit said me on the other hand I was able to get between three and five three was only really when I was using a lot of the functions on the daily but ultimately when it's just being used to track your steps and your heart rate everyday then it should be able to go the distance really the only problem with the battery portion is charging it charging the Fitbit blaze requires you to take the full device out of its frame and then put it into this awkward-looking clamp that connects us be wise to any power source it's far from an easy or even attractive looking way of charging the Fitbit blaze and it's one of these sorts when it comes to the battery life of this device which brings us to what the Fitbit blaze is actually made for tracking your daily now the Fitbit blaze is able to track your resting heart rate every single day and then using the movement of your wrist it will track the number of steps in our testing the step counter was actually pretty accurate it didn't grossly overestimate or underestimate how many steps that were taken and when it comes to the heart rate monitor when it comes to mostly resting and over the day type of readings then it actually works pretty well resting heart rate is obviously one of the ways to judge what your fitness is like if you have a lower resting heart rate in general maybe around 80 and below then you're pretty fit and over the day you'll be able to see just how your heart rate goes up and down depending on different activities that you do we also liked the sleep tracking the Fitbit blaze was pretty good at figuring out when the user was asleep even if it was just for a nap in the middle of the day and the graphs inside of the app were able to show that but of course it's when you tell the Fitbit blaze that you're getting down to a real workout that you're going to get the kind of information that you need and you would hope that the Fitbit blaze is able to give you accurate readings because it is a 200-dollar device I suppose to do so unfortunately our results were pretty mixed we'll start off by talking about fitstar Fitbit bought fitstar a company that creates short workouts and even longer form workouts but the ones that come in the Fitbit blaze pre-installed are short workouts you have the warm-up which is about seven minutes and then you have a seven-minute workout and then a ten-minute abs workout the ten-minute abs workout does pretty much Tucker you out and during these different workouts you are going to get the real time tracking including the heartrate the thing is though that the fitstar ones are pretty good for just on-the-go workouts but they're definitely not enough to really get somebody in shape especially if you are really serious about power lifting or bodybuilding or just getting fit the thing about running though as Jimmy says in the written review is that while it does a pretty good job based on the movement of the risk of estimating how far you are running it unfortunately doesn't have any GPS installed and for a peripheral that is a little bit more expensive like this you will think that GPS is a part of it so you can actually track where and how far you are running the little caveats did it really end there though I brought the Fitbit blaze to my local gym where I did some barbell workouts and I found that the heart rate monitor was just not able to keep up when it comes to more long-form workouts the Fitbit blaze is able to keep up with this heart rate monitor because you're keeping your heart rate at a at a high level when your heart rate is over 150 let's say it will be able to read that over time it's not going to be very immediate in its readings but that's the reason why it got a little bit weird and that's because the heart rate monitor is not made for high intensity workouts high intensity workouts are HIIT or hits are the type of workouts where you go really hard for about 30 seconds or let's say two minutes it doesn't matter really how long and you're going to get your heart rate really really high for a short amount of time and then when your heart rate comes back down it usually happens pretty quickly the Fitbit blaze on the other and is not really able to keep up with that at some point during my workout I looked down at it and it still was trying to raise the level of the heart rate because my heart rate was already really high yet still coming down after I did some heavy squats still because of that even during that one hour lifting sessions I wasn't able to get the Fitbit to say that my max heart rate was anything above 150 which is a bit of a bummer because the Fitbit blaze as a somewhat more expensive in this tracker you would hope that Fitbit is hoping to help those who are really serious about fitness and get the accurate readings that they would want but there are still other devices out there that just simply do a better job at tracking certain things like the heart rate and even the steps in comparison which brings us to the final portion of this review and that is more of these SmartWatch capabilities now the SmartWatch features of the Fitbit blaze include notifications and music control but the problem is that that's about it notifications are actually really limited you are able to get notifications about calls but the watch will only really tell you that a call is coming in and you can't control what to do about the call if the phone is not right next to you and as far as message notifications go you can pick one application in order to get your notifications however that's really all that you're going to get in my case I used hangouts and if multiple messages came in from one person then it just grouped them together and I wasn't able to read them one by one very easily and finally the music control seemed to really need just particular applications in order to be useful in my case using NPR one and pocket casts I wasn't able to actually control where I was in those pieces of audio and so there you have it for this review of the Fitbit blaze a Fitbit is really trying to bridge the gap between the fitness tracker and the SmartWatch but unfortunately they haven't really perfected any one part of the spectrum on the one hand as a SmartWatch it is just simply limited certain functions that should be really good on a typical SmartWatch just aren't like notifications and even the vibration used for silent alarms but while a daily tracker is actually not that bad in the Fitbit blaze when doing more strenuous workouts and let's say more high intensity short form workouts it just isn't able to keep up with its heart rate monitor there are a lot of fitness trackers out there and the Fitbit blaze is just one of the newest and one of the that is trying to bridge that gap but unfortunately we're going to have to wait a little bit longer to see if one of these Fitness tracking companies can really get it right and find that great sweet spot right in the middle as always thank you guys very much for watching I hope you enjoyed this review of the Fitbit blaze we are going to be diving into the health portion of things a little bit so if you've been having trouble keeping your New Year's resolution after all we're already in March then maybe we'll be able to help you out by showing you what devices would be best for you to really keep up with your goals keep it tuned here to Android 34 even more and don't forget to head on over to Andrew authority comm to read the full written review on the Fitbit blaze after that you can subscribe to this channel if you haven't already and give us some thumbs up on these videos because we love to see that you like our content after that make sure you stick around because we are your source for all things Android