Fitbit Versa
A versatile smartwatch with four-day battery life and a compact design, all backed up by the Fitbit community
SCORE PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from fitbit.com
Is this the smartwatch that breaks into the mainstream? Fitbit hopes so. It’s stripped away the nonessentials from its first smartwatch, the Fitbit Ionic, to provide a cut-down price and a cut-down size. In doing so, it also hopes to attract more ladies to the smartwatch party, which until now has been dominated by men. Albeit the kind of men who glance nervously at their smartwatches and and refuse to dance.
The obvious benefit is the size of the watch on the wrist. I’m used to wearing a bulky Garmin Fenix 5X, so the Versa feels ridiculously compact and lightweight in comparison. Women who are used to wearing delicate and featherlight watches may not feel quite the same, of course.
Admitedly, it loses out to designer watches for style, despite Fitbit softening the corners with a rounding effect. You can choose between three colours – grey, rose gold and black – but the largest degree of customisation comes from downloadable watch faces and a choice of straps. A silicone strap comes in the box, and you can buy a designer leather strap for £50, for instance, or perhaps a mesh metal one for an excessive £70. Fitbit is doing its best to create the versatile black dress of watches, transformed by accessories, but isn’t ashamed to make a bit of cash on the side.
One inevitable consequence of dropping down in size is a smaller battery, which is why the Versa lasts for just over four days on a single charge, compared to the Ionic’s five days. That seems a sensible compromise, as Fitbit’s battery life claims ring true – based on my week with the Versa – and it recharges in under two hours. There’s even a neat charging station that you slip the Versa onto, but note that this uses a proprietary charging system and is incompatible with the Ionic. Also note that, to maximise the battery life, the screen is off most of the time. You can activate it by a flick of the wrist, but I found that only worked about half of the time – often I had to press a button to check the time. Thankfully, the 300 x 300 screen is vivid and bright when it does activate. As the lack of GPS indicates, this isn’t an outright fitness watch in the ilk of Garmin Forerunners. If you want to track your run or bike ride down to the last metre, you’ll need to bring your phone with you so that the Versa can “borrow” its GPS chip. Without, it still attempts to track how far you’ve been, but naturally isn’t as accurate. The good news is that it’s waterproof to 50m, and in the pool it will track lengths swum, calories burned and number of strokes. While it has many elements of a fitness smartwatch, the Versa is better thought of as a lifestyle watch. Not just in terms of fitting in with your lifestyle, but aiming to improve it. For
The optical heart rate sensor allows you to track your heart rate over weeks and months “While it has many elements of a fitness smartwatch, the Fitbit Versa is better thought of as a lifestyle watch”
instance, by default it nags you to get up and take some steps every hour of a working day. In that same spirit of life improvement, there’s a Relax app that’s call-the-lawyers reminiscent of the Apple Breathe app, and you’re encouraged via the Fitbit phone app to join its community of users for encouragement and support.
The watch’s Fitbit OS is incredibly easy to use. It supports all the usual smartwatch notifications – emails, texts, phone calls – and it’s always obvious what action you need to take to silence a notification or respond. The main navigation is via swiping and pressing the big Home button on the left of the screen, but there are also two physical buttons on the right that can be used in certain situations.
You shouldn’t expect a huge app store to rival Apple’s. Fitbit only opened up its SDK to developers last year, and there are still fewer than 100 apps to choose from. You’ll find a handful of big names – Strava, The New York Times, Philips Hue, Yelp – but in the main the third-party apps are from individual developers. Most developers’ focus appears to be on watch faces, with hundreds available to suit everyone from the data obsessed to the minimalist.
The final app of note is for music-subscription service Deezer. This allows you to sync playlists to your watch, and with room for up to 300 songs that should be enough variety for several workouts. Deezer costs £10 per month, though, so you may prefer to download your own tracks to the device. One final thing I feel duty bound to mention is the presence of an NFC chip for the Fitbit Pay app – but don’t get excited. Right now, only two obscure credit cards are supported in the UK.
So the Versa isn’t as slick as the Apple Watch, but it comes surprisingly close. Keen runners and cyclists will be better served by a watch with GPS inside, but the Versa is something you can wear every day without being conscious of the lump of silicon, glass and plastic strapped to your wrist. With Fitbit’s community to back it up, it’s a great buy at £200. SPECIFICATIONS 1.34in LCD display, 300 x 300 resolution 4GB storage (2.5GB available) 802.11n Wi-Fi
Bluetooth 4 NFC accelerometer gyroscope altimeter SpO2 monitor optical heart-rate sensor Fitbit OS 39 x 38 x 10mm (WDH) 23.1g (without strap) 1yr RTB warranty