C**L
Superb for Intermediate Fitness Tracking
I’ve read several reviews and would like to offer my experience with the Alta HR regarding several attributes. Overall, I love this fitness tracker. It is small, sleek, and simple enough to track exactly the features that I want and nothing more for a reasonable price. I am currently on my second Alta HR — I lost the first one and couldn’t get by without it.Device and battery life: I’ve had my current Alta HR for 1 year and 4 months and it is still rocking and rolling. I charge it once/week on Sunday nights and do not have to charge it again throughout the week, even with actively logging several tracked runs and workouts. The great battery life, especially for a continuous heart monitoring device, is one of my favorite features.Design and screen: What drew me to the Alta HR in the first place is the sleek and small design. The screen is just big enough to see the time, heart rate, etc and can easily be worn with any outfit (see also: cheap and colorful replacement bands for ease of matching). It’s a simple feature, but I love that when you turn your wrist upward the screen auto lights up to the home screen. You can customize this home screen— I have mine set to time and heart rate so all I have to do during a workout to see my HR is turn my wrist up. As others have said, the tapping can sometimes be finicky (~20% of the time the first tap attempt doesn’t register), but it’s really not that troublesome. Again, customizing the home screen to the features that are most important to you can resolve most of this frustration.Sleep tracking: I’ve found the sleep tracking to be accurate for the most part. I naturally have a high resting heart rate and it’s likely that Fitbit is underestimating the amount of deep sleep that I get (10% on avg). However, it does a good job of differentiating between sleep and awake and total hours slept. I like that the auto-light up feature of the screen is disabled during sleep. The device and band are very comfortable and I don’t notice them during sleep.Heart rate tracking: I’ve found the heart rate monitor to be VERY accurate. I was not expecting this level of accuracy and have been very impressed. I do not have a strap monitor to compare with, but I have manually monitored my heart rate (neck pulse and a timer) at different intensity levels and found that my Alta HR was always within +\-3 bpm. As others have said, you do need to follow the directions of the device to get accurate heart rates during workout. The device is EXTREMELY accurate when following the directions. If you are going to workout (or do any activity that causes substantial wrist turbulence), you need to move the device 1-2 fingers above the wrist and tighten it an extra loop. This allows the device to maintain a constant and reliable read during motion.The app: The fitbit app is not unique to this device, but I LOVE it. I love that it syncs with both the device and other apps. I can use MyFitnessPal for my food and it auto-imports and uses that information to calculate remaining calories, including ones that you burned through activity and basal caloric burn (if you set a weight goal, the app will show a dial that uses this information and tells you if you are over, under, or on target for the day and by how many calories). It also easily allows me to track water intake. It obviously also has step goals and hourly step goals, as well as active minute goals. All of these goals can be customized, and move reminders for the device can be customized by in the app. The app also uses resting HR and GPS tracked run information to estimate your VO2 max. The device and app also will auto-detect several activities (walking, running, “outdoor sport” like tennis) with 10+ minutes of an elevated heart rate and steps. I really enjoy this feature because I feel it gives me a more accurate read of calorie burn than just entering a “tennis doubles for 20 minutes” activity in MyFitnessPal.Step tracking: Accurate as far as I can tell. Some have complained about not having accurate step counting while pushing a stroller etc— you can still get your steps counted (but not heart rate) by strapping this to your belt loop. I frequently visit manufacturing environments where I cannot have anything in my wrist and strapping the device to my belt loop always yields an expected number of steps.Other features: I like that the devices notifies you about texts and phone calls and scrolls the person and a message preview (can adjust in settings) if you prefer. I did not want my phone on my wrist as a distraction all the time (@apple watch) and the Alta HR level of notifications is perfect. The device is also water resistant: I’ve accidentally taken it in the hot tub for a few minutes multiple times and it’s not been affected except for a temporary cloud over the screen once that went away after a couple days. I’d hesitate to purposely swim with it though.
A**R
The Alta HR looks almost exactly like last year’s Alta
The Alta HR looks almost exactly like last year’s Alta, which means it’s more of a bracelet than an activity tracker. It’s modular, so the bands on either side of the plastic module in the middle can be easily swapped out. It has the same display as the Alta. It’s not touch sensitive, but requires a tap on either the face or side of the module if you want to cycle through your data. This can get annoying.There is one noteworthy design change: the strap. Last year’s Fitbit Alta had a snap-in clasp (one I didn’t like very much), but this year’s has a more traditional railroad-style strap.Some people have asked me whether the Fitbit Alta HR is now a replacement for the Charge 2. My answer is: not really. They’re the same price and both have heart rate sensors. But you can stop and start exercises with the Charge 2, and you can’t do that at all with Fitbit Alta HR. The Fitbit Alta HR will automatically recognize if you go for a run, but it’s not something you can control, and it doesn’t display a timer during your activities.So what can this Fitbit do? It does what a Fitbit does. It tracks your steps, your distance traveled (without GPS), your calories burned, and your sleep. It shows you notifications and incoming calls from your smartphone. What’s new about the Alta HR is that it has optical heart rate sensors built into the underside, so it records your heart rate throughout the day, and Fitbit will now show you more advanced sleep data in its app. This latter feature isn’t limited to just the Alta HR; it will work with any newer Fitbit that has heart rate sensors. I look at the Fitbit Alta HR’s heart rate data as something that is nice to have, data that I wouldn’t trust entirely but could still help to inform other activity decisions.The same goes for distance tracking: since the Alta HR doesn’t have GPS, or even connected GPS through the phone, my expectations were low. After a five-plus-mile hike last Friday, the Fitbit app told me I had taken more than 19,000 steps total that day and had been active for 158 minutes, but I also noticed within the app that the activity was automatically recorded as just 4.97 miles.This is also the same with sleep tracking: unless you venture into a lab and have sleep sensors taped to your body and have that sort of data to compare it to, it’s hard to gauge the accuracy and efficiency of consumer trackers like Fitbit. But Fitbit is at least trying to give you more insights into what’s going on when you’re sleeping. More importantly, it’s trying to tell you what that means for your overall health.Sleep sessions are now broken down into light sleep, deep sleep, REM stages, and time awake, with a breakdown of your overall sleep quality. There are sleep insights now, too; the app will say "You were 31% in REM sleep last night" or "Light sleep doesn’t mean weak sleep! Your body actually performs a number of important functions during this sleep stage." It’s all a little reminiscent of the insights that — dare I say it — Jawbone used to offer with its UP activity-tracking system. It’s good to see Fitbit catch up. All of this may seem like I’m feeling fairly non-committal toward the new Fitbit, when in truth I like what Fitbit has done holistically with this product. It’s still the same bracelet-like Fitbit from last year, but with one hardware addition and one new software feature that improve the overall experience. Its battery life lasted me nearly a week, from a Wednesday night to the following Wednesday, on a single charge. This is more impressive when you consider the added heart rate sensors. Over a week, I became a little addicted to Fitbit again, wanting to get my steps up, trying to pay attention to the move reminders, actually checking the app every now and then to see how I slept or what my resting heart rate was that morning. I did miss real exercise-tracking features while I was wearing it, and am still a lot more inclined to buy a wearable that has GPS and other advanced sport tracking.But the new Fitbit Alta HR told me just a tiny bit more about my activity than what I knew before, and was just so easy to wear. And if we aren’t getting mind-blowing technology advances in wearables right now, then that’s probably the next best thing.
Trustpilot
1 day ago
2 weeks ago
