I'm definitely on both sides of the fence.
After Fitbit bought Pebble, they made the ecosystem poorer. The Pebble tech team was stronger than the team that absorbed them.
Fitbit customer service is excellent, but their warranty is bad, and their build quality seems poor.
My Fitbit Ionic (about $300) stopped working one month after the 12 month warranty ran out, and they offered me a 20% discount on my next purchase. They haven't lit up the SiO2 sensor on the Ionic after (3?) years.
Google is great at a lot of things, but how invested are they in being a supplier of a niche, always connected device that collects personal data every second of the ...
Wait a second! Things might be looking up for Fitbit devices! (But maybe not the users)
My Fitbit Ionic stopped working 6 months into the 12 month warranty and they flaked on the warranty anyway.
Many Ionics were secretly sold without the manufacturer's warranty.
The problem turned out to be a shorted capacitor. My secretly-warranty-less ionic was sold during the Great Capacitor Shortage. Coincidence? Maybe. I doubt we'll ever know.
Do you make videos/streams of your work? Would love to watch.
Fitbit said they "had" to refuse my warranty on account of having purchased the watch from an "unauthorized re-seller" because of clones, but their software already checks serial numbers for duplicates and rejects clones, so that sounds like an excuse.
Incidentally, my next watch was a Garmin, and while I tried to buy it from the official Garmin store on Amazon I found a 3rd party store on the receipt, so I contacted Garmin and ask them if this would invalidate my warranty. They said it would not. They made good on that promise two weeks ago when a fatigue crack showed up in the plastic frame.
tl;dr Fuck Fitbit, Go Garmin!
When I'm working out or doing yardwork, it's handy to have access to these things on my wristwatch rather than trying to fiddle with the phone in my pocket. It's sounds like the most minor convenience, but I use it all the time. If that were to be limited to only a tiny number of apps (and not the Android bluetooth thing, which picks up whatever happens to be playing; usually VLC in my case, sometimes Spotify) it would be a lot less useful.
I could push those buttons through my coat sleeve while wearing gloves.
- Hit the back button a couple times to make sure I'm back on the watchface/home screen
- Hold down a button to shortcut into an app (e.g. music controls, music boss)
- Play/pause, control volume, go forwards/backwards (or 30sec skip in some podcast apps).
Hoping I can continue to use the device. Have any competitors come close in matching pebble's button UX?
I like my Apple Watch too, but I miss the hardware buttons and being able to do stuff without looking at it.
Apple's take is that I should talk to Siri instead of using buttons, but the 8 year wait for them to support 3rd party audio apps kept me from building any habits with that. I'll probably get used to it.
I don't want a watch that i have to charge daily, or i'll take it off and end up never putting it back on. I've been thinking of buying up some refurbished old pebbles as they have the exact features I want without the downsides of ALL of the newer watches/fitbands.
Other reasons for wanting spotify is a remote control. When I had my pebble and my phone was in my pocket I'd often use it to skip songs, drop the volume a bit, etc without having to pull out my phone each time
I don't want to carry around a phone during prolonged vigorous exercise.
Spotify integration makes a lot of sense for fitness watches.
Ok, but listening to music is cheating.
They said a long way back they were looking into releasing their own - fine. But still no chest-strap!
Chest-strap is required for serious (and safe) training near your peak heart rate - and it's a ton more accurate for regular exercise too.
All the other fitness watches support pretty much any chest-strap you can buy. They've standardized... but not Fitbit.
Not to mention you still can't export exercise data out of Fitbit. Some apps can send data into Fitbit... but good luck getting things out.
That's not a great business model. They should have devices that either scale with you, or different models with feature-sets that target different ranges of users.
The people that are active and stick with fitness tracking are exactly the ones that are most likely to purchase new devices over time - either as replacements or upgrades. Instead, they switch to Garmin or some other more "serious" fitness tracker. That's a crying shame for Fitbit... the original fitness tracker.
Supporting chest-straps, or selling their own chest-strap, doesn't mean a casual users needs to buy one. But it does mean a growing serious fitness enthusiast can continue to use Fitbit, buying new devices over time.
From my experience, Fitbit still has the most polished App. It's a darn shame you can't get more out of Fitbit devices though.
I have a Versa 2. They support Pandora.
I have not tried the subscription yet but plan to.
I definitely would like more innovation too, but IMO it’s still the best in class. I switched from the Band after MS discontinued. I had (and returned) an Apple Watch because of lack of good sleep tracking.
They don't support Spotify, or really any music app except the one (which I don't remember). Their subscription service provides no real value at all. Their devices track heart rate and nothing else. They simply don't innovate at all.