I’ve been looking forward to the Fitbit Charge 3 more than any other recently announced smart watch and activity tracker. In fact, the prior generation Charge 2 was my favorite wearable of all time… it did what it was supposed to do with minimal distraction, solid battery life, and an approachable price point.
And, now, the Charge 3 looks to take what Fitbit did right… and make it that much better with even longer battery life along with legit water resistance and a true mutlitouch display. In fact, I recently traded in my Apple Watch … which still doesn’t provide a native step complication. I get Apple’s intent to provide a more holistic activity analysis, but I’m looking for a simple, discrete, easily comparable metric. While I’m not entirely convinced I need sleep data and not sure what to do with it, Fitbit does provide beautiful little graphs… versus Apple’s continued absence in this space (hello Beddit) and its generally inferior battery life works against in in this category, as most of us probably power up overnight. Further down the line, Garmin’s new wearable doesn’t seem as visually polished and the company seems to often launch new products with a number of software bugs. So that’s also a pass for me.
Bottom line: I’ve got my $150 Charge 3 on order and retailer ABT was kind enough to whet our appetite with the requisite unboxing.