Thursday, May 5, 2016

Fitbit Charge HR - first impressions

I went ahead and picked up a Fitbit Charge HR today and am currently charging it.  As far as first impressions go, I am not pleased with the user experience out of the box.

When you open the box, you see the Fitbit, a small cord and a tiny piece of plastic.  None of this is identified.  There's two pieces of paper with it - a small booklet with tiny legal disclosures and another little flyer that tells you to go to fitbit.com/setup to set up your device.  That's it.  Not particularly friendly!

I went to that url on my phone, and it directed me to download their app.  Gee, thanks.  Downloaded it, and then signed up for an account, and finally got to the point where it would let me add the device.  Apparently, my Fitbit's battery was dead, so I needed to figure out how to charge it.  Nothing in the tiny papers in the box or the completely unhelpful fitbit.com/setup site tells you how to charge the device.  Ridiculous.  I guessed at how to connect the tiny cord to the device and then plugged it into my laptop, and... nothing.  Waited a minute and then pressed the button on the side (not that anything had shown me that I should do this!), and saw an empty battery icon with a charge indicator in the middle.  Guess it's charging finally.

An hour later, I go back and see it's still charging, but I want to get this set up on my phone so I start that process again.  This time, the phone does see the Fitbit and they get all synced up.  I'm currently on the "setting up your Fitbit charge hr" screen which tells me if can take up to 10 minutes, but the status bar on the bottom of that screen hasn't moved at all in the 10 minutes since I started it.



10 minutes later with no progress, I start searching for troubleshooting online.  I reboot the Fitbit, and suddenly the progress bar scooted along quickly almost halfway, and then slowed down again.

I also have no clue how close I need to have these two devices while syncing, but whatever... it just finally finished!  It's still not fully charged though, so I'm not going to unplug it just yet.



OK, all charged and set up finally.  Annoyingly, the tap-twice to see information thing works maybe 5% of the time (grrrr).

Tonight I'll wear it to my U-Jam Fitness class for the ultimate test - if it doesn't record things accurately, then we'll have issues. ;)

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