Fitbit Inspire 3

My Fitbit lasted about 6 months before it just stopped working. I sent it back for repairs under the warranty. After a few months it came back nicely functional. The Fitbit can detect some (not all) heart anomalies. It detected some strange heart behavior and dutifully notified me. This lead to a rather lengthy process which culminated with cardiac testing. The good news was, I do have irregular heart behaviors but they are normal irregular heart behaviors. The interesting part is 1) I can identify when it's happening (most people cannot) and 2) so can the Fitbit. Which elevates the Fitbit from personal fitness tracker to almost a medical device although it's too incomplete to be trusted with diagnosis. As part of the repair process, Fitbit offered me a renewed license for the Fitbit premium app. When I first tried the app, oh, now it's been years ago. I was extremely displeased. I was not interested in paying close to $100 a year to obtain information which the device had gathered but Fitbit was holding hostage until I coughed up $$$ for the subscription. My extended trial subscription has ended but so far the data is still intact. Let's hope it remains so. Because if they continue their policy of holding data hostage, then I'm going to find a different monitor. Before you buy any of these smartwatches or fitness trackers, check out the accompanying app and the subscription price. Download the app and try it out. It's actually the app that makes the device useable. Be sure, any premium feature that depends on data from the device is essentially a data hostage situation. I've only had one Fitbit before but that was ten years ago and it only lasted 18 months; a whole six months past the warranty period. I was so disappointed that it took me over ten years and a serious illness to try Fitbit again. So far this Fitbit has lasted 18 months active duty plus a real long stretch where it was out for repair. I am not impressed with the device reliability. The only reason I trust it (for now) is because I got hooked up to a real heart monitor for two weeks solid and the data from the Fitbit correlates well with the heart monitor. I had a long discussion with a sales rep from Best Buy. He, too, had a medical condition and was unusually well versed with the ins and out of the heart monitor functions of these wearables. First, the field is moving rapidly. Each generation of new devices brings improved functionality. This is how they get away with planned obsolescence and shitty quality hardware. I give good odds you'll need to replace the device every few years (as in 3 years, if you are an optimist). Second, watch out for compatibility; pair devices with compatible smartphones. Whatever you do, don't mix & match apple vs. android smartwatches and trackers. Quite a lot of these devices *claim* to be both Apple/Android compatible. Unfortunately, I didn't realize Google had acquired Fitbit some years ago. So the Fitbits went from smartphone agnostic to ignoring all the capabilities of the Apple iPhones. Two years ago when I started with this Fitbit, it could not integrate any data with the Apple suite of health apps. You had to obtain a separate app to integrate the data. Since I think the Apple health apps are better designed and more user friendly than the Fitbit app, I was genuinely disappointed. I should have returned the thing immediately. After I got used to using the Fitbit, I started the premium trial. By now, the return window had closed. Once I started the premium trial, that's when I figured out Fitbit was deliberately feeding only the raw data to the basic app. Anything that required even a whiff of computation was held hostage to the subscription. Now Apple gives you many health apps with their platform with but Fitbit withholds data integration with Apple thus cutting you off from this alternative source of data interpretation. They have improved syncing recently but it barely feeds the step data to the iPhone, I'm not seeing any of the heart monitor data on the Apple Health or Fitness app. BTW, the iPhone does have a pedometer function so Fitbit AIN'T GIVING ANYTHING AWAY. Now, I don't have an Android phone so cannot say much about how Fitbit does on that platform. But if you have an iPhone, getting a Fitbit is setting yourself up for the worst possible situation where you are reliant on Fitbit's app. And honestly, going from the Apple apps to the Fitbit app was a step down. And if you think the Fitbit app is difficult to use, then wait til you get a load of their website. Not recommended with an iPhone: if you like the Apple apps, you won't be able to use them with the Fitbit. There are a very large number of apps both free & paid that talk to the Apple Health/Fitness apps. Not one peep to the Fitbit app. The Fitbit app is stand-alone and presents their data with their nicely counter-intuitive interface but now the road leads to their subscription model The fitness information presented in the Premium subscription is actually the most unreliable. Fitbit takes the measures from the device and cooks up some additional numbers based on ESTIMATES derived from your age, weight, etc... and presents you with "fitness" measures. Their own fitness measures. What are these measures based on? Who knows. There are special apps that will sync your Fitbit with Apple Health but I found these were clunky and failed to integrate all of the data 2 years ago when I tested them. Sadly I've read reviews that the Fitbit is one of the BEST integrated with Apple. Which basically means, the Fitbit app offers enough functionality that it can outcompete other devices on infertile Apple territory. As of Jan. 25, 2025 the annual Fitbit premium subscription is $80.00 but there is a 3 month free trial to sweeten the deal. Why I found the premium subscription worthless: I have a medical condition which is messing with my heart rate and I tire out easily - therefore all of the personalized Premium recommendations based on my historical activity are out of whack. The Fitbit thinks I'm "exercising" for 4-8 hours a day and will cheer me on for such excessive exertion and recommend I boost my exercise periods to 8-10 hours a day. Actually I'm a couch potato and the "exercise" consists of trips to the restroom and kitchen with the occasional grocery run and cooking session. Somehow I am real skeptical that chopping vegetables should ever qualify as "vigorous-as-in-jogging" exercise. I figured out that my time spent sitting is counted as exercise because my heart rate will be so abnormally high that I'm in "fat-burning" territory. Nobody burns the fat off their butt by sitting on it. Can I create custom heart zones just for me? Yes, but that's worthless too since my heart rates will go through episodes of unusually rapid vs. relatively normal. The custom zones aren't that flexible. Many of the Premium features are based on heart activity (even the quality of your sleep). Everything is skewed. The calorie counter is hilariously off. The sleep measures are more like a suggestion. As for the effect of medications, LOL! Yeah, I'm on a heart medication that stops the heart from becoming, err..., overactive. After about a year, I learned how to reinterpret the readings based on my actual health, so the reads became useful as an additional confirmation that I was overexerting myself. But let's face it, I already knew that. Was it ever useful for me? Yes, once I calibrated myself to the readings (which took quite a few months and can only be done by ignoring all the "advice" the app offers), it's good at detecting my episodes of sudden extreme fatigue. The Fitbit readings would give me a heads up about 2 days earlier than I could figure on my own. Avoiding utter exhaustion was a critical step towards faster recovery. Also, the basic reads from the watch are sufficient for this. You don't need the premium subscription. But I recommend you play around with the app with or without a trial subscription. Since the interface is somewhat user hostile, it takes a while just to get used to the thing. How does the Fitbit rank against other wearables or against laboratory measures? So many health care workers wanted to know that the National Institutes of Health commissioned several studies reviewing the most popular devices. The Fitbit ranks pretty well and is one of the more accurate wearables. Go to the NIH website to read the study yourself. BTW, these studies are a couple of years old and aren't aging gracefully. Compared to laboratory instruments, the Fitbit is a good pedometer and the heart monitor works OK even if it is limited to the most basic measures. Now, the calorie counts and all the other measures that depend on the heart rate/pedometer readings aren't as accurate. Meaning, the Fitbit isn't well tuned to each person. They are using age and other categories to estimate instead of using individual data like your actual amount of muscle mass. Also, it's pretty vague compared to laboratory instruments about auto-detecting when you start exercising (there's about a 10 min lag) and when you fall asleep and switch sleep stages. Yeah, I found with yoga sessions that it would fail to detect sessions entirely even if they lasted over half an hour. And since I'm not walking around during yoga, it failed to register significant movement. I had enter sessions by hand. It does a bit better with more vigorous exercise, the more lively, the better. Let's just say detecting a normal walk is very, very iffy. It counts the steps accurately but fails to register it as an exercise session. Out of all the multi-hour walks in the past year, the Fitbit auto detected one (1) walk. Only Fitbit knows if that represents significant errors in measures like the calorie count and fitness levels. It doesn't have an altimeter (which the iPhone has) so it can't count the number of stairs you climb. There is no way to import the iPhone altimeter readings into the Fitbit app. ^@$#!$!!! Excuse all this French but for one of the best integrated with Apple fitness trackers, that charges $80 a year, I think the Fitbit app sucks. The Fitbit is meant to be a fitness tracker. It's a decent fitness tracker if you happen to be a healthy person who doesn't expect much, however, Apple has a bigger picture approach to their Health apps and will include medical data. I doubt the Apples are sophisticated enough to actually monitor a real medical condition but that is clearly where they are headed. The Apple Watches are capable of detecting some medical emergencies based on detecting falls, heart monitor data, car crashes, etc... and are capable of calling 911 (you can stop this alert if it's not a real emergency). For Android users, there are a whole different set of high end smartwatches that perform somewhat similarly. Bear these differences in mind when comparing wearables. I thought I wanted a fitness tracker and that's what I got. But re-analysis tells me I wanted a health monitor and that ain't the Fitbit. However, for the price of the Fitbit and the value of its basic readings, it was well worth it as a training device that told me what I really wanted. At this point, it looks like the Apple Watch is the only wearable that's well integrated with Apple and it's not super clear that's it's advanced enough to be what I want... yet. Is the lofty goal of health monitor fair to impose on a mere fitness tracker or even one of the current smartwatches? Probably not. My condition is unpredictable in a rather peculiarly predictable fashion. The only computation that could make heads or tails of my data would be AI AND I would need a database with information based on patients with my condition. I am dead certain we ain't there yet. But I am also dead certain we ain't far from this goal. Unfortunately, my condition is pretty rare, so that hoped for database isn't the most commercially viable product that's going to be coming out this door.