Confession time: I’m a bit of a wannabe when it comes to self-quantification. The idea of counting every step I take, every calorie I eat, every day I don’t have a cigarette and every minute I lie in bed restlessly tossing and turning sounds great. I want to be able to look at my life as a series of easy-to-understand numbers that I can act upon to improve myself. And every time I review a new wearable or fitness tracker I think, This’ll be the one to make it stick. The latest in the long line of would-be life-changers is the $250 Fitbit Surge
Pros
GPS and heart rate monitoring are welcome additions
Fitbit finally solved its sleep-tracking problem
Food database is robust and easy to use
Cons
Design is better suited for the gym than the office
Slightly bulky body and strap
Pricey for an activity tracker, even one with GPS
Summary
The Surge solves some of Fitbit’s problems with better food and sleep tracking, while adding GPS and heart rate monitoring to the mix. But its bulky, utilitarian design and high price will limit its appeal.
Hardware
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So, spoiler: I’m not wearing the Surge anymore.
We’ll get to the reasons why shortly, but first let’s talk about what the Surge does well. The one feature that immediately jumps off the page at you is built-in GPS. Yes, the Surge marks Fitbit’s first foray into serious running watch territory. It’s not the fastest or most accurate GPS in the world, but it gets the job done most of the time. It reliably takes about 60 seconds to lock on to a signal ( all of our tests took between 58 and 63 seconds) , and spits out a reasonably accurate map of your run. It did lose signal once and the resulting map showed me careening wildly around my neighborhood. But I’ve also experienced this problem when using RunKeeper on both Android and iOS; it’s annoying, but not unheard of. And it’s certainly less infuriating than the time the Microsoft Band left me running in place for 15 minutes while it repeatedly failed to get a GPS lock.
The Surge marks Fitbit’s first foray into serious running watch territory.
Like many other fitness trackers starting to hit shelves, the Surge has a heart rate monitor built in. Don’t expect medical-grade heart monitoring, but it will give you a pretty accurate average heart rate for your run. Partially thanks to this new sensor, the Surge is dramatically better at sleep tracking than past Fitbits. As long as you don’t have sleep tracking set to sensitive, that is. For the first week or so I was wearing the Surge, it seemed as if Fitbit couldn’t do simple math. The app would say I slept from roughly midnight to 7AM, but only managed to get two and a half hours of sleep. On the plus side, Fitbit can now automatically detect when you’re sleeping.
?
Obviously, the Surge also counts steps. That’s the whole idea of a Fitbit, really. They’re connected pedometers above all else. And like its stablemates the Charge and Charge HR, it does a perfectly admirable job of keeping tabs on just how much you’re moving throughout the day. The new material isn’t any less likely cause rashes if you never take it off, but it is extremely soft and comfortable. In fact, it feels less like plastic and more like a hi-tech fabric used in expensive athletic clothes.
You’re not going to mistake it for your trusty Timex Weekender.
Unfortunately, it’s also a bit bulky. It’s not as cumbersome as many smartwatches on the market, but you’re also not going to mistake it for your trusty Timex Weekender. It will occasionally get in the way and it won’t fit neatly under the cuff of a long-sleeved shirt. The wide band and distinctly athletic design also mean it looks quite conspicuous. More than once while out and about, friends gave me quizzical looks and asked, What is that? That’s because when you go out wearing the Surge, you look like you’re always getting ready to go for a run. And that’s a problem. Activity tracking is only really useful if you’re doing it all the time. If you don’t want to wear it while you’re not exercising, it kind of defeats the purpose.
?
To make matters worse, it’s not really a great watch. The touchscreen is far too sensitive and is rarely actually showing the time when you look at it. More often than not, you’ll find you’ve somehow navigated to the number of flights of stairs you’ve climbed. Thankfully it takes several button presses to fire up the GPS; otherwise I’m pretty sure you’d start tracking a run in your sleep. And then there’s the battery. Best-case scenario: You’re getting a week on a charge. So much as look at the GPS, though, and that will dip to about five days. If you’re wearing it to train for a marathon? Expect something closer to two.
Software
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The Fitbit app is light-years beyond where it was back in 2013 when I first strapped one of the company’s devices on. Visually, it’s brighter, more coherent and generally just looks like a modern smartphone app. But more importantly, the calorie-counting portion of the app is finally good enough to run with the big boys. Where in the past it didn’t take much to stump its food database ( really, you’ve never heard of Goya? ), now Fitbit is overflowing with results and nutritional data. And finding that information is easier than ever thanks to the addition of a barcode scanner ( finally! ).
The calorie-counting portion of the app is finally good enough to run with the big boys.
The other big advance is that Fitbit can finally automatically detect when you’re asleep. That means no more remembering to press a button to tell the wearable it’s bedtime. And, as mentioned before, if you don’t turn on sensitive mode the sleep tracking is actually pretty accurate. From there you can dig through the collected data and start looking for those disturbing trends, like the fact that I average about four and a half hours of sleep a night during the week and that it takes me almost an hour to really settle into a restful sleep.