Fitbit Charge HR review: Super features, but could be more sleek

When I first reviewed the Fitbit Charge HR back in 2016, I concluded that – features wise – it was pretty much spot on, but looked a little bit clunky. It also missed out on Fitbit’s later trend of customisation, meaning you’re stuck with the colour and style of strap you bought at the time.

Well, the people at Fitbit were clearly reading – or more likely, realised this for themselves. The sequel – the Fitbit Charge 2 – fixes these qualms and more to take its place as the fitness tracker to beat. It’s great, and you should definitely consider it.

True, it retails for £10 more (and probably a lot more in the real world as shops clear out stock of the old model), but it’s an extremely worthy upgrade, adding in text notifications alongside the enhanced aesthetics. As for the original Fitbit Charge HR – well it’s still a good wearable that won’t let you down with broadly the same fitness tracking capabilities. So if you get a good price, then go for it.

You can read my original thoughts below.

Why are we reviewing the Fitbit Charge HR in 2016? That’s a very good question, given it’s now over a year old. The reason, chiefly, is that with Fitbit venturing into smartwatch territory, piling on features as it goes, the cheaper, more cheerful fitness band models still sell phenomenally well. Is the Fitbit Charge HR worth buying in 2016, when the Blaze is more fully featured, and the Alta is sleeker and cheaper?

Call yourself a fitness enthusiast? If so, you’ll probably want to know about the Fitbit Fifty. Simply put, it’s a massive running and cycling tour of the UK thats starts Buckingham palace, winds its way up to Edinburgh Castle, and comes back down again. Oh, and it takes 50 hours. Interested? This is what it’s like to do it.

The Fitbit Charge HR is a simple beast: a textured, thick rubber strap with an LCD display and a button. Behind its simplicity is one piece of clever tech that other Fitbits lack, though: the “HR” in the name stands for heart rate.

Yes, the Fitbit Charge HR is the cheapest of the company’s fitness trackers to pack a heart-rate sensor. At £120 that still isn’t pocket money by any means, but given other models that can read your heart rate cost either £160 or £200, that’s still a bit of a bargain in my book.

But how does the Fitbit Charge HR look in 2016? Let’s find out.

Fitbit Charge HR: Design

The Fitbit Charge HR is a strange beast design-wise, aiming for the minimalism of the Fitbit Flex, but without the svelte style to quite pull it off. It’s around a third wider than the Flex and draws further attention to itself with a textured criss-cross design on the rubber. It’s not unappealing, but struggles to square the circle: it’s too big to be understated, but too bland to be eye-catching.

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The screen does the job, and it’s easy to cycle through the various tracking metrics that the Fitbit uses to keep an eye on things, either with the button on the side or by tapping the strap. It’s certainly advantageous to offer both, and if there’s one thing that living with Android Wear has taught me, it’s that touchscreens and running don’t make for ideal bedfellows, so I’m happy to sidestep that particular input.

Unlike other Fitbit models, the Fitbit Charge HR cannot be customised. While the Flex, Blaze and Alta all allow the Fitbit’s “brain” to be removed for charging, the device here is built into the strap. That means that the strap colour you buy is the colour you’re stuck with, so choose carefully. You could possibly remove it with a bespoke tiny screwdriver, but it’s obviously not what the company intended.

The strap for the Fitbit Charge HR is actually a lot more secure than that of the Flex, including a traditional watch strap-style buckle to hold it in place on the wrist. This does come at a cost, though: if you take it off too quickly, you’ll find trapped skin an occupational hazard until you get used to unthreading the loop first.

In fact, the whole thing feels less comfortable than other trackers I’ve worn. The strap rubs against the skin since you’re supposed to wear it reasonably tightly for the benefit of the built-in heart-rate monitor, and the rubber just doesn’t feel that comfortable. Other Fitbits can be worn 24 hours a day, but with the Charge HR, you’ll find yourself wanting to give your skin a rest.

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Fitbit Charge HR: Features

The Fitbit Charge HR sits as the third most expensive model in the range, and it generally boasts the features to match, including that elusive heart-rate sensor, which only appears in this, the Blaze and the Surge. On top of that, you’re getting your usual mix of step counting, sleep tracking, floors climbed, silent alarms and Caller ID. What you’re missing is multisport, text notifications, music control and GPS. That last one might sound like a deal breaker, but if it is, you’re looking at paying £200 for the Surge: currently the only Fitbit to offer the feature natively.

Here’s that information in graph form:

With respect to features such as music control and text notifications, their absence is not so much that the Fitbit Charge HR isn’t capable of them, but that the screen is so small that they’d be a fiddly addition. The Fitbit Alta gets away with more despite being a bit smaller because its screen is in portrait, rather than landscape, occupying the majority of the top of the wrist. Fitbit clearly decided smartwatch-style features would just be too fiddly on a screen this size, and it’s hard to disagree.

Fitbit Charge HR review continues on page two

Fitbit Charge HR: Performance and battery life

The big prize here is the heart-rate monitor. Other than that, it is identical in specifications to the Fitbit Charge, and pretty similar to the Fitbit Alta, both of which come in at £20 cheaper. As an upgrade to the Charge, it’s a no-brainer, but the sleeker design of the Alta certainly makes it a harder sell in 2016.

What the titular heart-rate monitor provides is a constant update of how hard your ticker is working. Cycle through the menus, and you’ll find a little heart icon with a number next to it, and from there you can quickly establish what your average resting heart rate is, along with some interesting stats. For example, generally my heart rate sits at a cool-as-a-cucumber 60bpm, but playing the drums can push it up to the 90s, and climbing the 135 steps at Goodge Street Station seems to nearly kill me every day, no matter how often I do it, pushing me into the 140-150 range. I hit a similar point while playing five-a-side football.

The feature isn’t perfect – sometimes it struggles to get a reading, and other times it puts out some very strange estimates (after a 5k run, it pushed me down to the 70s when I was still clearly dead on my feet), but for the most part it offers a solid ballpark figure of how your heart is coping, and thus how your fitness is improving over time, which is very much in keeping with the Fitbit ethos.

From a practical runner’s point of view, you can also use it as an additional tool to see what a comfortable speed for you is if your body can’t tell you directly. That’s quite handy – only without a GPS, and with limited chat to other apps, you’re left having to do some legwork for yourself. This is what the Fitbit site tells me about Saturday’s 5k run:

It also told me I took 3,776 steps, burned 376 calories and enjoyed 26 active minutes, but what of distance? What of average pace? None of this stuff features because of the lack of GPS, but the Fitbit Blaze manages to figure out some of this by piggybacking on the phone’s GPS sensor, so it’s definitely possible.

What this means, in practice, is that you have to combine the data here with a third-party running app and overlay the two. Here are my Runkeeper stats from the same run, and suddenly a better picture begins to emerge:

Runkeeper is also far more optimistic about the calories burned, which is nice, and yes, they both have the same weight listed.

So how far did Fitbit think I ran, without a GPS? I generally take a dim view on fitness trackers estimating distance, given my past experiences, and it appears I was right to be dubious here. Fitbit doesn’t give you a specific for activities, writing ‘N/A’ in the space provided on the site, but it does give you a total per day. So by dividing the day’s total distance by the number of steps taken, I deduce that the Fitbit Charge HR estimated my 5km run as… 3.47km. Swing and a miss.

But we already know that tracking distances without a GPS are pure guesswork – what’s disappointing is that Fitbit linked up with Runkeeper and didn’t adjust its figures to make sense of the additional data.

In terms of battery life, Fitbit reckons you’ll get your standard five days from the Charge HR, and that seems pretty much bang on the money to me, although if you look at the screen a lot you’ll probably notice a drop-off. As with all Fitbits, the Charge HR comes with yet another proprietary charger, which is annoying for all kinds of reasons, not least of which is the fact that the company charges a small fortune for replacement cables. Fortunately, five days gives you plenty of time to be ready with the cable, especially as the service emails you when it’s running low.

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Fitbit Charge HR review: Verdict

It’s easy to see why the Fitbit Charge HR is one of the most popular models around. In terms of features, it includes pretty much everything anyone wanted from the original fitness band plus heart rate, which can be a useful metric in its own right, without breaking the price point or adding extraneous additional smartwatch features.

On the other hand, and this is entirely my fault for only getting around to reviewing last year’s model at this point in the company’s history, it just doesn’t feel as polished as its newer siblings. The rubbery strap is too wide to be minimalist, it doesn’t offer any customisation options, and it just isn’t that comfortable to wear for extended periods – a fact not helped by the presence of the heart-rate monitor, which needs to be held close to the skin to function.

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Fitbit has been on a design journey in the last 12 months, pushing hard on customisation and style. The Fitbit Charge HR is likely the last model we’ll see to single-mindedly focus on substance, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The newer models are more stylish than this and better made than the Flex, without losing their casual fitness focus.

The Fitbit Charge HR is possibly right in the sweet spot in terms of features, but in 2016, it’s lacking the comfort and style I’d look for in a fitness tracker. If the company brings out a follow-up, however, the smart money says it will be the fitness tracker to beat.

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