Fitbit Alta HR Fitness Tracker with Heart Rate, 7 Day Battery Life, Compatible with Smartphones, Tablets, Computers

Ok so I promised myself I would test out the Fitbit against the several negative comments and come back and leave a review. All but ONE of the negative comments prove true. Let me start with the negative comments that proved untrue and why:Myth 1: this Fitbit doesn’t record accurate heart data, especially when working out. TRUTH: Yes it does record extremely accurately, including during workouts but you have to read the instructions!! When you workout the instructions say to tighten the strap one hole tighter than you usually wear it. Then you move the Fitbit 1-2 finger widths up from where your wrist meets your hand. After doing this I checked the Fitbit heart rate against my polar heart monitor every 5 minutes during a 45 min kickboxing workout. It was EXACTLY in tune with the polar heart rate monitor, always right on or within 5 BPM. The people who say otherwise are not following instructions or giving it a chance to figure out the best wrist placement.Myth 2: The light against your skin keeps you up at night/you can see the light as you try to sleep. TRUTH: No, you cannot see the blinking light that is against your skin. If you can then your band is way too lose. I wear it every night and never see the light blinking. I don’t even remember I’m wearing it!Myth 3: it scratches easily. TRUTH: I’ve banged mine up pretty bad and to my surprise not a scratch in sight!Okay now for the negative comment that I discovered was true: It does not track steps when you are pushing a grocery cart or stroller. Sadly, this is true. Very frustrating when you have a child and you push them around the zoo all day in a stroller to later discover your steps barely moved. I solve this by letting my husband push the cart/stroller when possible. :) But this is the biggest negative for me about this Fitbit. I just learn to let the number on the screen go on those days when I have no one to push the cart and know that day I had a lot more steps than recorded.Things I love:1. The constant HR monitoring where you can see your heart health over time improve or get worse (in the Fitbit app)2. The sleep monitoring - this has been so eye opening! I can’t wait to check the app in the morning to see how much deep sleep I had the night before. I now know based on my results how I’m probably going to feel that day.3. Getting texts and calls!! It buzzes when you get a text or call and will scroll the message across the screen or show you who is calling. LOVE this feature.4. Stays charged for a long time.5. LOVE that it shows you total calorie burn for the day. Like the calories your body burns just by sleeping or sitting to workouts. This was the biggest reason I got this Fitbit (besides the constant HR monitoring) so I could make sure I was truly burning the calories I thought I was burning to aid in weight loss. That helped me to I know exactly how many calories to cut to lose weight.Things I wish I could change/do but in no way a deal breaker:1. Rearrange which stat I see first when I tap my watch.2. Be able to set it so that I can constantly see my HR when I’m working out. It gets old tapping it several times while I’m working out to find my HR.3. I don’t trust the calorie burn calculator. It seems really low. After a kickboxing workout where my polar monitor says I burned 300 calories, the Fitbit only recorded 130 calories. I’ll keep looking into this and see if I can get something figured out. Thankfully you can add your workout in MyFitnessPal and it will sync up to the Fitbit app, including the calories you burned.4. Would be cool to have an option to add optional stats when you click through on your wrist, such as the weather.I recommend this Fitbit if you are looking to track constant HR, sleep, total calorie burn, and get alerted to texts and calls. I have learned so much about myself and my health.

I had a Charge HR for about a year. Happily switched to the Alta HR when it came out. My wrist is 6.5” and I got a large. I wear it on the second smallest hole (with the Charge HR I’d worn it on the third smallest). I like the large because it can fit around my ankle if I want, and the extra strap fits across most of my under-wrist which I think looks good.STEPS: it does this just as well as the Charge HRHEART RATE: Does this just as well as the Charge HR. I run a few days a week and it gets the same readings.STAIRS: Doesn’t have this function, but I found it flaky in Charge HR and always got more stairs than I’d actually climbed for the day, so I don’t miss it.BATTERY: I had it set with “All-Day Sync” on and "Always Connected" off and the battery has lasted about 8 days. A little after the 6 day mark I started getting low battery warnings (I guess they start happening at 25%). I started getting nervous it would finally give out at the 8 day mark so I put it on the charger. I tried it with “Always Connected” on next and it lasted almost the same. I got the low battery warning earlier on the 6th day. By the 7th day I decided it was close enough and started charging again, so I'm not sure exactly how long it will take, but at least a week.ALARM: I like this better than Charge HR. The alarm goes and buzzes about four times. If you don’t do anything it stops and snoozes and goes again 9 minutes later. You have to tap it twice (or more, I usually bang on it a few times) to turn it off. Otherwise it just keeps automatically snoozing. I like that if I’ve decided I want to sleep a little longer I don’t have to do anything.SLEEP TRACKING: when set on “normal” was about the same as Charge HR. I tried it on “sensitive” for a few nights and I got big wide bars of “restless” and the tracker only counted the non-restless times as sleep, so even though I was sleeping for 6 hours, it only counted 2 hours as sleeping. I thought that was weird so I’ve had it set to “normal” since. Maybe this reading would be useful to someone, but I found it confusing. Five days after getting my Alta HR it started tracking “sleep stages”. This is cool, I like getting to see what stages I got at night. If you click on the chart it walks you through what the different stages are and what percentage of your sleep they made up.HOURLY ACTIVITY: It warns you ten minutes before the next hour if you haven’t had your 250 steps yet. I like this, I don’t always care to accomplish this throughout the day, but on the days that I do I used to get frustrated if I lost track of time at work and missed an hour since there’s no way to go back and get steps in so you just ruined getting 100%. I’m glad Alta reminds me. Sometimes instead of just walking around I stand up and shadow box - the punching counts as steps and my arms and torso get a workout and I get the elevated heart rate and I can get to 250 quicker.EXERCISE TRACKING: It can tell when I’m running, although like Charge HR it won’t know distances, just steps, heart rate, and calories. It doesn’t have the side button to start an exercise timer, but I never used that in the Charge so I don’t miss it. I have two other apps I use to track my runs, so I don’t care that much about how detailed the Fitbit tracks them. Although I did recently discover the fitbit phone app can track my runs if I start it at the beginning of the run (on the exercise screen click the stopwatch and go to the tracking tab: you can select the activity then click the play button. If it’s a run it uses the phone’s GPS to map the run).CALL/TEXT ALERT: I like getting the little buzz to let me know to check my phone. It displays a little of the text message, but not much. Which is fine, it’s usually enough to give me an idea of whether it’s something important or not.