Fitbit Ionic Smartwatch – Superior Battery Life to Apple Smartwatch

One of the biggest complaints of smartwatch owners is their notoriously short battery life.  For instance, the top-selling Apple Watch has a battery life of only 18 hours.  It’s impossible to get an overall picture of your day when you’re constantly having to charge your watch.

The Fitbit Ionic is different.  It’s battery lasts for approximately 5 days.  A huge improvement over most other full-service smartwatches.  You can sleep, exercise, work, shower and get a full report on how your daily, uninterrupted life is going and determine where you need to make changes.  You can leave your house for the weekend without having to pack along the charger.  The GPS battery is an impressive 10 hours, double the 5 hour life of the Apple Watch.  The Fitbit Ionic is the first true challenger to the Apple’s smartwatch.

While the extended battery life may be the most attractive feature of the Fitbit Ionic, there are other impressive features that make it a real contender to the Apple Watch.

Fitness and sports tracking is exceptional.  It comes with the now fairly standard step counting, stair climbing, calorie counting, heart rate monitoring features.  But, the Ionic also has a much improved sleep tracking system.  Stages of sleep are carefully monitored and suggestions to improve sleep quality are also available.

For more intensive sports tracking, Fitbit’s SmartTrack automatically recognizes a number of exercises, while also giving a more in-depth analysis of running, treadmill running, swimming, cycling, weights and workouts.

Running Program Highlights:

• vibration indicator when you’ve reached your distance goal
• stats customization (pace, calories burned, heart rate, distance, average pace…)
• auto-pause
• auto-run detection
• fast gps
• touch screen allows you to easily cycle through screen options
• run summary (including maps and heart rate graphs)
• easily syncs with Strava
• accelerometer for monitoring treadmill runs

Cycling Program Highlights:

• auto-pause
• stats customization (pace, calories burned, heart rate, distance, average cycling pace…)
• workout summary (including maps and heart rate graphs)

  

• accurate gps
• easily syncs with Strava

Swimming Program Highlights:

• keep track of lengths, distance and duration on touch screen
• waterproof even in open water
• calories burned and heart rate stats available

Strength Training Highlights:

• weights mode monitors time, heart rate and calories burned only
• no rep counting through wrist movement

To help support fitness goals the Fitbit Ionic also comes with the Coach app.  It offers a variety of workouts based on difficulty and duration.  As you progress, so too does your fitness program.  Some of the sessions are offered through the Ionic, while others are offered through Fitbit’s personal training app (powered by FitStar).

Like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, the Ionic allows you to pay for things with a simple tap of your wrist with Fitbit’s, Fitbit Pay.  Capital One, HSBC and Royal Bank are already on board with more to follow.

Apps are another strength of the Fitbit Ionic which has a number of first party apps as well as third party apps like Strava, Starbucks, Pandora, AccuWeather, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Uber, Nest and many others.  The Fitbit Ionic is proving to be a real challenger to the Apple Watch.

Future features of the Ionic are also exciting.  One of these features will take sleep tracking to a whole new level.  The Ionic will be able to help diagnose sleep apnea by tracking the levels of oxygen in the blood.  Fitbit has also partnered with Dexcom to help diabetics monitor their glucose.  Dexcom monitors will send glucose levels to the Ionic for fast, accurate glucose tracking. Though these features are not yet live, Fitbit promises they are just around the corner.

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