Fitbit Charge 4 Review: 9 New Things To Know - YouTube

Hey folks, it's Ray at DCRAINMAKER.com here. And today I've got '9 New Things to Know'

about the Fitbit Charge 4. Now I've been using this for a while now so I've got a pretty

good idea on what works well...and what may need still a little bit of love.

So as such this video is not sponsored in any way, shape, or form. Just me talking

about all the newness here. What works well, and again what might not be so hot.

Now the first thing you know before we get into the official '9 Things' is the

pricing. This is $149 US dollars, I'll put the other currencies on right now there.

There's also the Fitbit Charge 4 Special Edition which is $169. That simply gets

you these extra bands, or technically one extra band in three part. That is a

fancy looking band. There is no other difference between the two, it's just

simply the bands and the bands only. That's a notable departure from the past

where the Special Edition of a Fitbit variant usually had some other features.

Again same software, same hardware...just simply extra bands. So with that let's

get into the first new item on the Charge 4 which is the fact that it has

GPS in it. In the past, the way it worked is if you wanted GPS tracks after the

fact. For example to upload to Strava, you had to go ahead and have your phone

nearby. Versus now there's GPS built inside of this fitbit claim is about

five hours of GPS on battery life and in my testing that seems about right i

would say between four and five hours but pretty much close enough that's

different however the normal battery life which is seven days when the GPS

isn't on and for that it also seems about right it's a bit tough for me to

tell because I charged a bunch of times they had a bunch of really long GPS

activities so the way it works when you want to start a GPS activity is you go

ahead you just swipe to the right you choose exercise there you choose the

sport you want if you want to go and turn off GPS you would swipe up at this

point and then you would choose to turn off the GPS but if I went out for a run

for example outside GPS has on by default you wait for GPS to find signal

generally takes between five and ten seconds then you press it again and

you're off and running quite literally as you're running it'll go ahead and

show your pace using GPS it also shows your distance again using

GPS and all that seems to work more or less just fine pace stability in the

words how stable is that pace if you're running pretty stable seems to be mostly

pretty good couple wobbles here and there but it's in the ballpark of what

most folks would want from an accuracy standpoint that also looks pretty good I

did a bunch different accuracy testing around this in woods

nann woods in the tall buildings all the kind of stuff and for the most part it's

pretty solid it does seem to occasionally cut corners a little bit

more than I would like but on the whole it's not too bad if you want to see a

bunch of different GPS accuracy testing check out my full written review it's

linked down below or somewhere on the screen there I go into excruciating

painful detail on both the GPS and the heart rate accuracy of the charge for

moving on to number two on the list is the addition to fitbit pay so that means

that you can take a credit card debit card and load it on to this watch

assuming your bank supports that we'll get to that part in just a moment there

so there you better go ahead and hold down the button go to nearby merchants

and tap to pay for something pretty straightforward you probably using on

your phone for quite a while and fitbit's had on their wearables for

quite a while too but only at the versa and ionic basically their higher-end

wearables so it's the first time we've seen it at $149 price point from Fitbit

or actually really from anyone so there's no other company that I know of

that has a $150 wearable band the has GPS in it and it has contactless

payments in it and part of that is because doing contact us payments in a

wearable is really really tough because you have to talk to every single bank

out there which gets back to that first bit of whether or not your bank supports

it Fitbit has a site you can look through and see if your bank is on the

list there it's not as simply saying all visa are all Amex for all mastercards

your actual issuing bank has to support that so to put that in the context for

me in the US my issuing bank for most of my credit cards is chase and chase is

supported so I was able to load on my chase card honor this launch

no problem all you use walk through the Fitbit app takes a couple seconds so you

get to add it and then from there as it's the device and then from there you

hold on the button on the side for a second you type in your PIN code once

that's complete the pin code part is a bit messy but you get used to it I guess

then you go ahead and just tap on our payment reader and you're done

straightforward but that was for the US I live in the Netherlands and here my

bank ING isn't supported it's not on the list at all though most other major

Dutch banks are also I have cards from France and those ones are not supported

either so you're gonna have to go to the site and see whether or not your bank is

out of there at this point being a few years down the road if your bank isn't

on there it's probably not looking super positive

of course Fitbit is adding banks all the time but just kind of keep that in mind

this isn't something brand new speaking of support by the way if your fun in

this video interesting or useful to somebody

whack that like button down the bottom it only takes a second and it really

helps out this video and the channel quite a bit so the next on the list is

the new sleep metrics in particular sleep score that's a score from 0 to 100

though hopefully not it like the 0 side of things that judges your sleep for the

night the higher your sleep the heart call

your sleep the higher the score in in most cases for me having toddlers at

home that ranged about in the 70 or so range for a sleep score I'd say that

seemed maybe a wee bit optimistic but I guess I'll have to take it to see your

sleep score you can actually see in the summary view on the Fitbit charge for

itself or you can see it later on in the smartphone app that Fitbit app there you

can also see the Fitbit app your sleep stages and durations you can plot them

over time and all the graph will go to goodness that you'd expect from pretty

much any other app including the Fitbit app also Fitbit does offer the Fitbit

premium service which is something you can pay for and that gives you bunch of

sleep plans and things like that so sleep guidance or coaching to hopefully

giving you better sleep in my case if I were to do that my toddlers would just

laugh at me also Fitbit has promised a new feature which is a smart wake

feature that will allow you to go ahead and set an alarm for example 7:30 a.m.

and then will wake you at some point between 7:00 and 7:30 depending on your

particular sleep stages or phases now in this case if it hasn't promised a date

that is saying coming soon which unfortunately fitbit's history in this

particular coming soon category is not super strong the last time they promised

something coming soon it was almost a year later so we'll have to see on that

one it is something that is on many other wearables so hopefully we'll see a

Fitbit implement it sometime soon there were four on the list is the addition of

Spotify kind of sort of I mean it's more like a Spotify remote than it is a

Spotify on the watch the wearable the thing so the most important thing to

take away from this is there is no music on the Fitbit charge for period you

cannot put music on the Farge for the Fajr for the NE for it cannot go on this

wearable itself you cannot play music directly from this to your headphones

again just to make that SuperDuper clear no music on here what it does though is

a controls music somewhere else so you go and you take the charge for in

particular the Fitbit app and you link it up to your Spotify accounts behind

the scenes or some magic and then from there you can take this and control your

Spotify playing on your phone or on your computer or

on anything else Spotify plays on you can control their via your wrists

technically speaking it mostly works sometimes though not always sometimes it

gives me like an app error or something else but when it does work a lot you go

and play a different playlist you can actually swipe through them here you can

stop and start songs you can go ahead and all of the things you would expect

from a remote control but from your wrists in practice though it's just not

super useful like it's just kind of cumbersome to get into to use just like

but just just pull out your phone you have to be your phone anyways so I'm

sure there are some very slim scenarios where maybe you have this on you in a

gym and your phones in a bag close enough that range sort of works and your

headphones you control it that way but honestly I appreciate the gesture but

I'll pass thanks maybe just put music on there that'd be cool but again there's

not music on here on the bright side that does bring us number five of the

list which edition of active zone minutes active zone minutes are

basically Fitbit giving you a credit for doing more intense workouts but to step

back a little bit talk about sort of the zone minute goal which is that you have

a hundred fifty active zone minutes per week that falls alongside the American

Health Association the WHL guidelines of a hundred fifty minutes of exercise per

week or roughly five times thirty minutes per week how you divide that up

though is really up to you it's something that many of the wearable

companies have been doing for a long long time and so fitbit's gone into that

and they've rebranded parts of it and give me more credit for more intense

workouts so to put this into context let's say you do a 40 minute run and the

first 10 minutes are a relative basic warm-up pace you'll get 10 minutes of

active zone minutes credit for that I think of like 10 coins instead but then

you go and do 20 minutes of hard running for that you'll be in a different zone a

harder zone and you may get 40 minutes of credit for that 20 minutes of running

so at the end of your run you could end up with say 60 active zone minutes for

only a 40 minute run kind of a cool concept and kind of make sense if you're

doing really hard workouts you'll be able to see your active zone

minutes on the device itself at the end of a workout as well as on the fitbit

app and you can see how many active zone minutes you have towards your weekly

goal as well on the device and also in the Fitbit app which gets us right into

the next one which is the new heart rate zones or in particularly the new active

zone the idea behind this is to take generic

heart rate zones and give them fancy names like fat-burning zone and cardio

zone and things like that they're basically just heart rate zones that you

can probably actually remember in your head you can lightly customise some of

these zones in the Fitbit app but for the most part they are what they are and

the way they are structured or what they are but as you're doing a workout you'll

get notifications each time you change zones you can turn that off though if

it's annoying just in the settings for each individual workout type and then

after the fact in the app you'll see which zones you were and how much time

you spent in each zone and then on the map itself you'll see which owns you're

in as you were running or riding whatever the case it's pretty cool

actually when you look at the map and see that for an interval workout because

you can see the hard part the work effort of that being in red and you can

see the easier parts being in orange because I was doing recovery there so

it's kind of neat there overall again nothing earth-shattering but it's

somewhat appreciated it sort of take the sports side of it and push it a bit more

into the more basic wearables that Fitbit has next up on the list there is

a new weather option or weather widgets that means that you can swipe through

here and go to the weather option right there and then see the current weather

around you so if you're in a dark cave like I am right now I can see what it's

doing outside you can also go ahead and add your friend's house on there by

adding another city or multiple cities if you want to and then you can swipe

through and see those cities as well pretty straightforward

also straightforward is the next feature which is the addition of the agenda so

in that same widget role there you swipe until you find agenda and that you'll be

able to connect it up to your calendar on your phone you can also choose to

show or not show free time so that way you can see what's free in a calendar

versus just assuming that your entire day is free and it didn't sink properly

or whatever the case may be and the last but not least on the list here is

they've added a boatload more watch faces or clock faces in the past that

was somewhat limited now you have 24 which means it's somewhat less limited

you can't customize much of anything on them but they are there you can choose

which ones you want swipe through different options on the app apply it to

the watch the band and you're good to go ok so there you go kind of a complete

look of the overall picture of all the new features the question is though how

does this fit into the greater landscape of activity trackers or wearables or

sport focused wearables and I'd say it fits in pretty darn well a hundred 49

bucks there is nothing else out there on the market that has contactless payments

and GPS in it and this form factor and has a seven-day

battery life and and an that's solid so if you're out there looking for

something to go and do a casual like 5k or 10k runs this is a really great

option for you however if you're looking into something

that has more features in it this might not be it for example you can't

customize any of the data fields on the sport modes you can choose different

sport modes but you can't say which fields are on there or which fields you

do or don't watch or which pages you do or don't want that stuff is all kind of

the way it is it's their style and you can't tweak any of it so you got to sort

of figure out what you want same goes for GPS battery time if you're looking

to do a longer day hike this won't really cut it at four to five hours of

GPS on time if you left in the morning even came back at five o'clock you would

have had your battery died around two or three o'clock in the afternoon so that's

something to keep mine as well still for the vast majority people this is an

awesome option for the price and it's nice to see fit but kind of sort of

finally getting it I feel like the last couple years have been a little bit like

a every time I look at them you're like me maybe I guess on sale versus this I

don't think this has to be on sale very often to still be a pretty solid deal so

there you go hopefully found this interesting or whatever the case may be

if so again like that like button on the bottom there or hit the subscribe button

because there is plenty more sports technology and particularly wearable

goodness coming up over the next couple weeks that you will not want to miss out

on with that have a good one