![]() New featuresįitbit added a few more things to the Charge 4, and many revolve around sleep. My Charge 4 was down to 20 percent after 3 days of all-day and all-night wear, which included two hour-long GPS workouts and an hour of non-GPS exercise. Unless you’re going for an intense hike, you probably won’t use the GPS for five hours straight - but occasional GPS use will still drain the battery faster than normal. ![]() Fitbit estimates the band lasts up to seven days with regular use, or up to five hours while using the GPS. The Charge 4 is designed to be worn all day and all night, and how hard you push the heart rate monitor and GPS will have a big impact on the band’s battery life. It does have interchangeable bands, so there is the potential to spruce things up with woven and leather accessories. This makes for a dated design (the Charge 3 came out in 2018), but that can happen when function comes before fashion. The rest of the fitness band is almost indistinguishable from the Charge 3, with its thumb-sized module, OLED touchscreen and left-side inductive button. It’s the same pulse tracking technology found in other Fitbit devices and it works just as well here. Functional hardwareĪctive zone minutes wouldn’t be possible without a heart rate monitor, which the Charge 4 has. While occasionally annoying, the buzzing motivated me to push myself harder to stay in that higher heart rate zone for longer. The Charge 4 vibrated often during my runs, mostly because I spend part of the time power-walking and the rest of the time actually jogging. You’ll know which heart rate zone you’re in by the number of buzzes - one buzz for fat burn, two for cardio, and three for peak. If active zone minutes sounds familiar, it’s because Apple, Google and Garmin wearables all track similar data. This information will tell you if you reach the recommended 150 minutes of moderate activity, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, per week recommended by the American Heart Association. This ties into Fitbit’s newest exercise metric, active zone minutes, which keeps track of how much time you spend in each elevated heart rate zone. Every time I turned up my wrist to pause the audiobook I was listening to, I was frustrated to find no controls available to me.ĭuring workouts, the Charge 4 buzzes lightly when it detects spikes in heart rate. If you’re an Apple Music subscriber or if you like listening to Audible while you run there’s nothing here for you. But Spotify users are the only ones who get this luxury. Users are given two good reasons to leave their smartphones at home when exercising - but most will not take the plunge because they need to workout to music (or they just prefer to workout with their phones just in case they need to make a call).īut it’s worth noting that the Charge 4 has some music chops - Spotify Premium users can control playback from the touchscreen. The decision is even more confusing when you consider the Charge 4 also has Fitbit Pay, letting users leave their wallets at home and pay with NFC. ![]() Including only GPS or only music storage makes it feel incomplete, and unfortunately, many wearable companies commit this sin on mid-tier devices. ![]() Unlike some smartwatches with both features, you need your phone with you to listen to music while you train. These overlays give you a better sense of when you were working the hardest.Īnd yet, I couldn’t help but feel like I was missing something with the Charge 4’s lack of onboard music storage. Route lines change color depending on how intense your heart rate was and how fast you were running at that moment. The resulting route maps were accurate, and I appreciated that Fitbit added “heat maps” for heart rate and pace data. ![]() Running was a seamless experience from start to finish - the GPS never dropped my location and the device didn’t overheat. I didn’t have to wait, though, because Fitbit lets you start a workout from the Charge 4’s screen while the GPS pinpoints your exact location. It took the GPS about 30 to 45 seconds to grab my location around my home on Long Island. The Charge 4 fixes this glaring oversight: the built-in GPS automatically tracks your location when you start an outdoor activity (running, walking, etc). None of the Versa smartwatches have it, and the Charge 3 didn’t have it either. It’s baffling to know that the Ionic has been the only Fitbit device with GPS since it was introduced in 2017. ![]()
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