Fitbit Edge
Price: €179
Website: https://www.harveynorman.ieOpens in new window
Where To Buy: Harvey Norman
To screen or not to screen? That is the question you might ask yourself about a fitness tracker. The trade-off between notification fatigue and a useful nudge when you need it is a deeply personal decision. But Google’s newest device, the Fitbit Edge, might just straddle the line between the two.
Despite the similarities in name, the Edge and the Air are very different devices. There is the glaringly obvious – the screen – which gives you access to limited notifications and apps such as Google Maps. You can also keep an eye on your activities as they happen with the Edge, or take an ECG with the device, should the notion take you.
But it falls short of a full-on smartwatch, limiting the number of apps you can install to the essentials, so you don’t feel as if there is yet another screen vying for your attention. The AMOLED colour screen is big enough to see the essential information, but not so big that you feel compelled to pay attention every time it buzzes. It feels a bit like a throwback to what Fitbit did best in the early days: a focus on activity tracking with fewer distractions.
That puts it firmly between the Air and the Pixel Watch 5, a halfway house for those of us who want to but can’t quite let go of the full smartwatch.
It has built-in GPS, so you can use it to track runs, without your phone on hand. You will need it for music, though, as the Edge doesn’t have the capacity to sync playlists offline.
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All the data is fed into the Google Health app, which is available for both Apple and Android, and tracks trends on your activity and sleep, plus health markers such as heart rate variability and blood oxygen levels.
Like the Air, the data will also feed into Google Health Coach, included with the premium subscription on Google Health, to give you personalised coaching and better insights from your data. You get three months of Google Health Premium free with the Edge; after that it costs €9 a month, unless you have a Google subscription that includes the premium access.
If all that nudging and trend tracking wasn’t enough, Google has also launched Health Guardian, which keeps an eye on your health data and trends. The base version includes high and low heart rate alerts; a subscription unlocks blood pressure trends, insulin resistance and sleep quality trends.
So there is a lot going on with the Fitbit Edge. Is it enough to justify the €180 price tag, though?
There are some notable omissions. It doesn’t include NFC, which means no contactless payments, for example. But how often do you use Google Pay from your wrist? I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I have ever used contactless payments via my watch, regardless of the platform – and even then, it was only in a dire emergency.
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Battery life is decent. Google puts it at seven days, but that will primarily depend on what you are using it for. Push it with too many tracked workouts and you will see it diminish rapidly. I accidentally left a workout running for a few hours and the battery life fell off a cliff.
But you can give it a few minutes of charge and get a couple of days of battery life back, which is a good feature.
There are also plenty of customisation options, from bands to watch faces. The included band is silicon, which my skin doesn’t like, so swapping it out was a priority. At the moment, third-party bands are hard to find and the official Google ones are expensive, but expect that to change in the coming months.
Good
The Edge may feel like a step back to what Fitbit did best, but sometimes nostalgia is a good thing. It has all the essentials, from GPS to skin temperature monitoring. Battery life is also good, even with heavier use.
Bad
Doesn’t include NFC, so if you are a watch-payer, you will feel the lack of it. Lack of affordable band options.
Everything else
This is Google’s first tracker with a user-replaceable battery. There are some caveats, though, like having some experience in watch repair. It might still be best left to the professionals, if only to have peace of mind that its IP68 rating is intact.
You can install up to six watch faces on the Fitbit Edge, which should be more than enough to suit your mood. At the moment, there are 13 options in the Google Health app, although each of them have different customisation options, from colour schemes to what data is shown.
Verdict
A lightweight tracker that bridges the gap between screenless and full smartwatch.