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Fitbit Charge 5 Fitness Tracker Review: A Lightweight, User-Friendly Tracker With Some Intriguing New Features

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Although I don’t plan on doing much swimming with my Fitbit, it’s nice to know I don’t have to be super anxious every time I get it slightly wet while washing my hands or if I forget to take it off before jumping in the shower.

Other Features

One big draw of this particular Fitbit is that it comes with features often saved for smartwatches, including call and text notifications. In general, I found the notification system with the Charge 5 to be comparable to the Versa models. But with the smaller screen, I found it was honestly challenging to navigate the “clear” button to make the notifications go away. And I frequently received multiple “active call” alerts while on the same phone call. If I planned to switch to the Charge 5 for good, I might honestly turn these alerts off entirely.

A new feature I did enjoy with the Charge 5 was stress management tracking. With this feature, you’re given a daily score based on your sleep, heart-rate responsiveness, and activity levels, and the chance to log your perceived stress level using five options from “very stressed” to “very calm.” I’ve noticed that my fitness, sleeping, and eating patterns are highly connected to my mood and anxiety. So it was nice to be able to track that so concretely and see the patterns really jump out. But I wish there were more options for emotion tracking other than just “stressed” or “calm,” or maybe a section to add some notes about how I’m feeling and reflections on why that might be. (A “stressed” on one day may not necessarily be the same “stressed” the next day, ya know?)

Alongside stress management tracking, Fitbit introduced the ability to do an electrodermal activity (EDA) scan with this model. An EDA scan tracks the electrical conductance of your skin, which is affected by sweat (also called the galvanic skin response). It’s a test that has a long history in psychological research and, especially when paired with other measures like your heart rate, can be a useful measure of your overall level of stress or intense emotion.

To do an EDA scan with the Fitbit, you have to pinch the sides of the device for a full three minutes—which feels uncomfortable at first—while it counts how many EDA responses you give off. I found the process interesting, but I wasn’t sure what to do with my results. They don’t show up in the app in the stress management section and there’s no interpretation given about whether your score is on the high or low end of things. That said, much like the guided breathing exercises Fitbit offers on the Versa models, the app will show you how much your heart rate goes up or down during the activity, and mine always went down. I guess the truth is that sitting around for three minutes doing nothing but deep breathing feels nice, no matter what the numbers mean.

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A feature I was excited to test out, the Daily Readiness Score, which estimates your level of recovery and gives you a sense of what intensity level you should aim for that day in your workout, was not available yet during my testing period. Fitbit has not announced a firm release date yet for this feature, but the company says it’s coming “soon.”

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, the Charge 5 is a Fitbit tracker and it sticks with what Fitbit does best: offering user-friendly, familiar fitness tracking features with an easy-to-navigate app. The Charge 5 also has some nice upgrades—a brighter screen, always-on mode, and lightweight wristband, for instance—that set it apart from its predecessors and make it a really valuable workout companion.

Although I experienced some nagging issues with syncing after sleep and GPS tracking and didn’t really click so much with the big new features in the app, the Charge 5 is a solid fitness tracker at a pretty reasonable price ($180 for the tracker, which includes six months of the brand’s premium app features). And if you’re in the market for a new one, I doubt you’d be disappointed with it—as long as you have the patience to troubleshoot some problems here and there. 

Source: Self

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