The Fitbit Surge is definitely a fitness super watch but how smart is it? How does the Surge stack up against other smartwatches? http://mreh.ca/1HjKqqE The Surge is Fitbit’s most expensive wearable but also does the most as it provides heart rate monitoring, sleep tracking, GPS and as well as basic call and text notifications. It’s a fairly comfortable device to wear and has a great battery life. In our opinion, the Surge is a highly evolved fitness device first with smart watch features that feels a little slow. Based on our time with the Surge, we gave it a score of 4 Eh’s out of 5. We feel that this is a better smart watch then the Pebble classic and does much better than Fitbit’s own Charge HR and Flex. In terms of design, the Surge is a fairly bulky device though we didn’t find it getting into the way as much as the Pebble did. We didn’t have any issues with the wear and tear of the Surge despite looking like it is going to be uncomfortable to wear, we were surprised at how well at sat on our wrists. Fitbit recommends that you wear the Surge approximately 1 finger distance from your wrist bone to ensure a good heart-rate monitoring connection. This placement feels really awkward to me and I found that it was almost impossible for me to keep it at the optimal placement if I was wearing a long shirt. For fitness, Fitbit recommends 2-3 fingers which means the Surge is sitting close to the middle of my arm and if you’re doing an activity that requires lots of hand movement, like lifting, it’s going to move around a lot which gets annoying. For durability, Fitbit claims that the Surge has 7+ day battery life. Now I was a little apprehensive at first with this claim since my low battery power would come on after 5-ish days but the Surge would stay powered for another 1.5 -2 days after the warning. In terms of protection, the Surge is water resistant up to 50 m but Fitbit suggests that up don’t wear it swimming or in the shower with the primary reason of letting your skin breathe a bit. In terms of functionally, this is where the Fitbit stumbles in terms of being a smart watch but shines as a fitness device. As we said at the beginning of the video, the Surge is a fitness device first, smart watch second. One of the biggest things that limits how useful the Fitbit surge is the lack of 3rd Party Support in terms of apps. In our minds, a big strength of the smart watch is being able to add additional functionality via apps. Going from a Pebble to this Surge was very noticeable because I couldn’t customize what I saw on my wrist. In terms of handling, which we’ve defined as actually interacting with the device, the Fitbit Surge is a little quirky. This is a touch-enabled device but you still have to rely on the physical buttons to use the Surge. In terms of viewability, you can easily see the watch face in direct sunlight and the is backlit for darker viewing though you can’t just shake your wrist to activate the backlit, you need to push a button. interesting enough, there is a light sensor somewhere as the backlit doesn’t activate in direct light. Notifications are pretty basic as you only have call and text notifications which I felt was a bit limiting. You can’t really customize the watch faces much and we found that the Flare clock face was really the only one that would tell you how active you were during the day. Heart rate monitoring is accomplished via Fitbits PurePulse Technology, which are these green blinking LED’s that measure stuff in your skin. That portion of the Fitbit Surge extends past the bottom of the watch so it will almost stay in contact with your skin which means you’ll get red sticky areas after a while. There is a GPS receiver on this watch which is pretty crazy and it generally works. Like most other trackers, it will count your steps and flights climbed as well but is pretty boring. Now to put all these sensors to use, Fitbit allows you to easily select a specific activity easily. This feature can easily be the number one reason to get the Surge over the Charge HR but once you get going on an activity, you get a summary display showing you relevant information to whatever activity that you’re doing. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe to stay in the loop! We release 2-3 videos a week so there's going to be something new every week. We're all about helping you get the most out of iOS so click Subscribe! WEBSITE: http://www.mobilereviews-eh.ca TUMBLR: http://mobilereviewseh.tumblr.com INSTAGRAM: http://instagram.com/mobilereviewseh TWITTER: https://twitter.com/MobileReviewsEh AARON: https://twitter.com/Aaron_The_Ho FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/MobileReviewsEh GOOGLE +: http://bit.ly/GplusMobileReviewsEh

• published: 14 May 2015
• views: 61