FITBIT VERSA 2
The only other square watch in our shootout that’s often referred to as an Apple Watch Lite. The Versa 2 may not look it at a glance, but sports many major upgrades, and equally as many caveats. Reviewing the Versa 2 is like a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ situation.
First things first, the sensor in the Versa 2 is pretty much still the same as in the Versa, for which I have no complaints. It was, and still is one of the most consistently accurate wrist-based heart rate monitors I’ve tried so far. It has all-day tracking, extended battery life that actually lasts up to five days, improved sleep tracking (though I personally still don’t know what to do with this metric). However, there is no built-in GPS, so the watch can’t be used on its own.
The Versa 2 has a slightly larger screen (1.4-inches vs. 1.34-inches), though that’s honestly not noticeable due to the presence of huge, chunky bezels. However, it does feature an AMOLED screen that’s really bright and sharp. The Versa 2 also has an always-on display like the Apple Watch Series 5 that you can toggle on and off, though expect to knock its 5-day battery down to about 3 days if you do enable it. Still, that’s longer than what the Apple Watch can achieve.
The watch has a built-in mic and Alexa integration, but no speaker. So you can dictate message replies or ask Alexa questions, but can’t actually hold a speakerphone call like the Huawei Watch GT 2, and you’ll need to read all of Alexa’s replies in text.
The Versa 2 is a fitness smartwatch that comes close to the Samsung and Apple in terms of customisations. I especially loved the animated Bitmoji watchfaces. However, you can only load and store a single watchface at anyone time, so you can’t switch on the fly. A future OS update (Fitbit OS 4.1) is supposed to increase this number to 5, but not at the time of this review.
The watch has built-in memory to store local songs (around 300), which is great, and it now has Spotify preinstalled, which is also great, but the Spotify app on the watch simply acts as a remote. You can neither stream from the watch, nor download your playlist to the watch.
Fitbit has now extended Fitbit Pay to all variants of the Versa 2, which is great, but it’s still going to be a limited feature in Singapore, as only two banks (UOB and OCBC) are supported; I have neither.