Fitbit Ionic - First Impressions

The Fitbit Ionic is a promising looking fitness-focused smartwatch, or a 'fitness watch'.  I've been using one for a week and have some quick first impressions of it to share. 

Why the Fitbit Ionic? I like to wear a fitness tracker that can also serve as a basic watch. I'm not interested at all in most 'smart' watches - as for me all they do is offer me a lot of notifications on my wrist that I already receive, and often receive too many of, on my phone. I do like having a fitness tracker with a strong set of features, and if it can look somewhere between Not Ridiculous and Kinda Handsome in a work environment that's a nice bonus.

Appearance: I liked the look of the Ionic right out of the box, and still do after a week of wear. It's probably never going to be described as 'elegant' or 'fancy', but then again very few other fitness trackers would either. It looks interesting and sort of solid for a fitness tracker / smart watch hybrid. For me, it's not ugly or too clunky looking. 

Features: As usual with a Fitbit device, the fitness features are very good.  It does the basics like tracking steps, calories burned, active minutes, sleep time, and logging food intake, weight, and health and fitness goals. It also has a heart rate monitor that makes all of its tracking more accurate, built-in GPS, the ability to store and play songs, and on-screen guidance for a variety of exercise routines.  

For those who want smart watch features, it provides notifications for things like texts and calls, allows access to some mobile apps, and lets you pay with it using NFS as you can with a smartphone. There are a number of watch faces to choose from - so you can choose whether you want more or less fitness info buttons on the main face without having to scroll or press buttons to get to them.

Performance / Using the Ionic: So far the Ionic has been great to use.  I've used a number of Fitbit's (and other vendors') pure fitness trackers, Fitbit's previous effort at a watch-like device - the Fitbit Surge, and a couple of smart watches with allegedly strong fitness tracking capabilities. Most of those have been good at one thing, weak to awful at others - or at best very good as a fitness tracker but barely usable as a watch. 

The Ionic is proving to be quite good both as a fitness tracker and as a watch. Its touch screen is quick and responsive, and so is the wrist flick reaction to show the watch face. This makes it to quickly check the time and also my fitness output for the day. When I'm at the gym, it's easy to move through and tell it what type of workout I'm doing, and to start, pause, and stop the tracking of the workout. These features have been there on other devices I've used - but they feel more comfortable to work with and faster on the Ionic. 

The Fitbit app is also very good to see more detail on daily and weekly fitness efforts and where you stand with regard to any goals you've set. 

Battery Life: Battery life on the Ionic has been great so far too. Fitbit says it should get 4+ days and that's what I'm seeing - with emphasis on the plus. After my first five nights (it arrived at around 8PM) and four days it had nearly 25% left - and it seems to be sticking at that sort of pace - which is more than good enough for this level of fitness tracker / smart watch hybrid I'd say.

Short Story: It's tough finding a device that's a very good fitness tracker, a decent looking and useful watch, and gets good battery life. The Fitbit Ionic is checking all those boxes for me.