Fitbit Versa

FITBIT’S MOST VERSATILE SMARTWATCH TO DATE.

THE RIGHT PRICE and great fitness tracking, but is it well versed enough in added features to make a great smartwatch?

It might seem a little weird for Fitbit to release another smartwatch less than six months after revealing the Ionic, but the company has a history of offering a choice between two largely similar devices. If you take the Charge 2 and Alta HR as an example, the strategy has worked well in the past. Fitbit’s new Versa smartwatch takes a softer, more rounded form factor and attaches a traditional watch band to be notably more approachable and stylistically versatile than the Ionic. Rather than compete, these two smartwatches were designed to sit alongside one another in the market. In some ways, the two options cater to differing design preferences (the Versa is lighter, smaller, has softer edges and is more style conscious), but the devices simply offer a slight variation on the most divisive elements for consumers in order to appeal to the broadest possible market.

Fitbit created the Versa to be a smartwatch that could appeal to a large new market of people that find current smartwatch offerings prohibitively expensive. The Versa’s main selling point is that it costs $100 less than the Ionic (and many other competing smartwatches), but despite slashing close to a quarter of the price off, there are very few concessions.

The Versa’s fundamental drawback is the omission of an on-board GPS. This means the Versa relies on the presence of your smartphone to do any geographically pegged fitness tracking — an important factor in exercise maps and your Cardio Fitness score. For those who like to run without a smartphone, this is obviously an inconvenience, but for anyone wanting to step into the smartwatch realm for the first time, it’s really just a minor concession. Apart from connected GPS, however, there’s really not much the Versa misses out on. You can still load up to 300 songs onto it using the 2.5GB of storage space for MP3s or saved music from the Deezer streaming service. Then listen to that music directly through Bluetooth headphones if you want to ditch your smartphone. There’s also no compromise on the waterproofing, with the Versa maintaining the swim-proof 50m/ 5ATM water resistance rating. Fifteen of the biggest banks across Australia and New Zealand are on board, so you can upload your credit card details and pay for things using your wrist so you don’t have to carry your wallet either.

The Versa is also excellent as a fitness tracker, building on Fitbit’s established ecosystem of sports, nutrition, weight, stress and sleep tracking software to give you advanced insights into your overall health. The device’s Purepulse heart rate tracker maintains continuous all-day heart rate tracking for advanced health insights like sleep quality and Cardio Fitness scores, on top of full training diagnostics to give you unfettered access to everything Fitbit has on offer.

While the Versa misses out on the independent GPS and smart assistant capabilities of Apple’s Series 3 smartwatch, it does offer close to double the battery life for comparable usage situations and is between $150 and $250 less than Apple’s entry-level models. This might seem small, but charging every four days is much easier than having to take it off every other day in the long run — especially if you value ongoing sleep tracking data and don’t want to take it off at night.

[ JOEL BURGESS ]

FITBIT CREATED THE VERSA TO BE A SMARTWATCH THAT COULD APPEAL TO A LARGE NEW MARKET OF PEOPLE THAT FIND CURRENT SMARTWATCH OFFERINGS PROHIBITIVELY EXPENSIVE.