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

I enjoy my Alta but I do have a couple dislikes.The battery does not last a week. I have to charge every 3-4 days. While this doesn’t bother me, I was expecting it to last longer.The light is ridiculously bright at night and for whatever reason that is the only time it comes on when I move my wrist. It doesn’t want to work during the day when I need it to but come 2 am and I’m rolling over it’s like a flashlight. I also have to tap it ridiculously hard when I do want to check something.The sleep tracking works great for the most part and I love seeing my patterns and shifts throughout my monthly cycle. Occasionally it doesn’t work and there’s no better explanation than ‘oops sleep tracking was unavailable’.I am a female so I have monthly menstrual cycles. I can keep track of my symptoms and I enjoy that. There are two issues I have with this function. One: the symptoms are lacking. There are a wide variety of symptoms missing. Two: when you log something on the calendar block it always has the same black dot on the calendar and then the symptoms below. For a quick glance it would be really nice if the icons were seen on the calendar and not just a black dot. That way you can look back and immediately identify what you have as a common symptom three days before instead of having to check every single month three days before. When you look at the calendar it wouldn’t be a slew of black dots either. You’d be able to immediately tell instead of having to push on every single day to get specifics.I really like the slim band. I do not like guaky watches. I would recommend this Fitbit as I really do enjoy mine.One of my favorite things about this Fitbit is the silent alarm. It wakes me up and also has the options to do silent reminders. I absolutely love that.The Fitbit app that accompanies the Fitbit is easy to understand, navigate, and utilize. I have no complaints other than the monthly cycle tracking. As far as accuracy, my periods are extremely regular so the app is right every month when I am going to start. For someone with irregular periods I’m not sure how accurate it would be.I love my Fitbit and I would buy it again. I would recommend it as it is a very good tool. If you do not want a ‘smart’ watch this is perfect. I think the smart watches are a bit much myself which is why I went with this product. I have had mine for four months now and I absolutely recommend it because sometimes I even use it as a flashlight at 2 am.:)

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.

Overall, I like the Fitbit Alta HR, just super annoyed that my screen is dead after 1.5 yrs of normal wear and that I felt the need to double up with a different HR monitor during runs.I wore the Alta HR daily. I found it more accurate for sleep, distance, and resting heart rate than elevated heart rate during exercise. Elevated heart rate was almost always slow to update and too low when compared to me manually checking my own pulse or using other HR devices including a MIO ALPHA 2, treadmill detectors, and an app on my phone. So, I wore my old MIO ALPHA 2 when I went on runs to track my heart rate more accurately (I am doing interval training based on hitting HR max), and I wore the Fitbit at all times for other goals (like trying to lower my resting heart rate over time).Screen died after 1.5 years of daily wear, which is normally due to water but I never swam or showered with the Alta HR. It still vibrates, which helps me know when I've hit my daily distance goal or my go-to-bed alarm is going off. But I can't check the date, time, or progress from the Fitbit itself anymore. The default warranty won't cover my situation - if I purchase again I might pay for Fitbit protection plan (extend to from 1 to 2 years and cover user error). My MIO ALPHA 2 HR monitor is still fully functional after 4 years, though I only wear it while running (far too chunky for daily wear, battery would not last tracking HR all day, and app is way more simplistic than Fitbit).Random aside - I did appreciate the level of customization. Really wide range of tracking options and the app allows me to adjust the dashboard to focus on which metrics I care about. Also, I was able to set the Fitbit to show what I wanted to see, which changed over the course of 1.5 years.