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Fitbit Blaze review: A smartwatch in looks only
When Fitbit introduced its Blaze smartwatch back at CES, many people hyped it up as an Apple Watch competitor. It's $150 cheaper, but still features a color touchscreen, notifications, a host of fitness-tracking features and impressive five-day battery life. It's also the most stylish Fitbit yet, with interchangeable watch bands that include leather and metal options. But in the week I spent testing the Blaze, I realized it's not a smartwatch in the conventional sense of the word. The Blaze is a fitness-first device that does most of the same things as Fitbit's Surge fitness band, just in a more stylish package. It looks and acts like a smartwatch, but if you expect it to have as many features as the Apple Watch or most Android Wear devices, you'll be disappointed. But does the Blaze at least bring enough to the table to succeed on its own merits?
The Fitbit Blaze doesn't feel nice enough to wear every day
The Fitbit Blaze is a new type of device for the company. It's the first hardware Fitbit has made that could be classified as a smartwatch, albeit one with a major focus on fitness rather than the more flexible and relatively feature-packed approach that characterizes Android Wear and the Apple Watch. But just as with other smartwatches, the Fitbit Blaze aspires to be something you'll want to wear on your wrist: Beyond the fluoroelastomer bands that resemble those found in other Fitbit devices, the company is also selling more-premium leather and metal straps. The question is whether the whole package is desirable enough to want to wear on your wrist every day.
Fitbit Blaze is a $200 smartwatch with a focus on fitness
With the advent of smartwatches, barebones activity trackers from the likes of Fitbit might seem like a relic of the past. Well, Fitbit must have thought so too. Today, the company that built its riches from those very same activity trackers is unveiling the Fitbit Blaze, a real bonafide smartwatch that's much more advanced than anything Fitbit's ever done. It comes complete with a color touchscreen, interchangeable watchfaces, a slim design and lots of different strap designs. But unlike most of its rivals, it won't support a slew of apps and it has a proprietary OS, not something like Android Wear. Instead, the Blaze pares down the typical smartwatch functions to the bare necessities of call management, text and calendar alerts plus music controls. The rest of the watch is dedicated to the feature that Fitbit knows best: Fitness.
