Home » Product Reviews » Fitbit Blaze Review: A New Smart Watch From Fitbit Product Reviews Fitbit Blaze Review: A New Smart Watch From Fitbit 19 Views Save Saved Removed 0

Fitbit, a well-known brand has yet unveiled another innovation in the market at CES 2016 in Las Vegas. Fitbit Blaze, the advanced fitness tracker is a highly customizable and adaptable wearable watch, which is loaded with endless features. We bring forth the hands on Fitbit Blaze review with dissection of good and bad about the device.

The first identifying thing about the Blaze is that it has customizable watch straps, so basically you can pick the straps of your choice. It may not be much to look for, but having a variety of straps can always provide versatility in making a choice.

Whether this watch is better than its competitors or not, is still a million dollar question. We will let the readers figure out at the end. Here’s the Overall Fitbit Blaze Review that will give decide your purchase decision tomorrow.

Fitbit Blaze Specifications:

Extended Battery Life-Five Days Average

Interchanging Straps

Notifications support

Sleep tracking

Exercise tracking

Workout regimes

Touch screen display

Heart Rate Monitor

Also read this: How Does Fitbit Calculate Calories Burned?

Fitbit Blaze: Design and Build

Fitbit Blaze has a charming appeal. The design is slick and bold to perfection. From the usual round touchscreen, you get a black square screen, which resembles a great display. Even if it doesn’t look like a watch such as Moto 360 or Apple Watch, we adore the quality.

The main body – the touch screen is removable from the frame, hence, can be easily set with the straps of your choice. One noticeable design feature is the gap between the body and the frame, which is quite unusual, we even felt a bit surprised with this parallel gap, but it looked great once worn on the wrist. It gives a kind of unique appeal to this lightweight watch. The straps are extremely soft and give a comforting feeling when wrapped around your wrist. Switching back between the straps was a breeze.

The Blaze comes with 3 buttons with one by the left side, remaining two on the right side. The button on the left side is a back button, pretty similar to the smartphones, and the two buttons on the right are more or less versatile in nature. It varies in functionality based on the type of apps used during the application.

We were happy to see the physical manifestations on watch, but probably, you will end up using touchscreen more than the buttons. More or less, the build quality resembles a lot like Samsung Gear 2 Neo.

As we mentioned before, the watch comes with customizable straps, so you can always pick your poison and even keep them in bulk for different occasions. The straps are available in link bracelet, classic straps and leather bands as well.

While every strap gave a great appeal to the watch, we felt leather band to be the best. You can choose from silver, blue, black, purple, brown and grey. We bet you will certainly want to have at least classic and leather straps in your collection.

Fitbit Blaze: Display

There are many innovative watches in the market that offers similar kind of features, so what really make Fitbit Blaze a top runner from the competition? The most promising thing about Blaze is the push notifications, which can be enabled from any of the Bluetooth connected devices. Now certainly, you cannot expect to display all the notifications of your phone, but will get you going with calls, texts and calendar notifications. Here we felt that some of the options like calendar alerts should have been replaced with more helpful features like email notifications.

Fitbit Blaze: Hardware

1. PurePulse Heart Rate Monitor

Another feature is a Heart rate sensor known by the ‘PurePulse’. The sensor is located on the rear of the tracker and unfortunately, it doesn’t provide accurate readings. The readings were varying in large proportion, even when the user was standing still. This feature is much better in other watches such as Apple Watch. However, we feel that it may require more testing in actual long term usage to determine the efficacy of the feature.

2. SmartTrack

While the Blaze offers endless features, there are a couple of them that simply left a great impression in our mind. By that, we mean about the SmartTrack technology, an ideal tracking app that automatically activates exercise reader when going for a run or jogging. The automatic exercise app is a good workout tracker. For better results, one must manually select the type of exercise to get more accurate results rather than opting for an automatic feature.

Also Read This: How Accurate is Fitbit?

3. FitStar

Another workout app is a ‘FitStar’ feature, providing a seven-minute fitness regime, specifically done at any location. It is an ideal alternative for the ones, who cannot go to a gym. All you need to do is connect your smartphone and see the breakdowns for every exercise.

4. Sleep Tracker

So, all the features and specs look good on the smartwatch, but what we really need is the longevity of the battery. How does this watch fare in terms of battery? On an average, the Blaze runs for five days on a complete charge, however, it fluctuates with the usage. We believe that it has a great battery life, purposely for longer usage. No longer will you have to charge the device before sleeping. One more feature related to the sleep is that it has a sleep tracking technology as well. It monitors your sleep cycle and provides you with an everyday report on the sleeping pattern.

In terms of usability, the Fitbit watch is user-friendly and pretty simple. With each swing in relative direction, you will get different menus and notifications right on the display. And here comes the biggest weakness of the device- while switching over the menus and other options, you will notice a lag in the display. It certainly spoils the greatness of this watch, a huge bummer for a $200 watch. Another dent comes with the lack of GPS, making it very frustrating for enthusiasts and other athletes.

Fitbit Blaze: Pricing and Availability

The watch comes at the cost of $199.95, which will see a release in March 2016. Anyone desiring to pre-order the gadget can easily refer to the Fitbit site and place the order. You can also buy different kind of straps, with leather at $100, classic at $30 and bracelet at $130, a bit too high for the worth.

Buy now: Fitbit Blaze Smart Fitness Watch -$199.95

Fitbit Blaze vs. Apple Watch

When it comes to a smartwatch, variety of applications are the major part that makes user to buy it. In that case, apple store has tons of apps supports to their Apple watch. Which is a great let down for Fitbit Blaze.

Fitbit Blaze has a feature that connects with the community, you can share your fitness data with your friends and run to achieve the leaderboard. It’s a motivational tool that comes with the smartwatch. But there is no sharing with friends option in Apple Watch, which is not so great too.

So, each of them has their good and bad in their product, so which one is best for you? read more!

Fitbit Blaze: Final Verdict

Also Read This: Razer Nabu Smartwatch Review