The Ionic is Fitbit’s second smartwatch, after last year’s Blaze. Besides the usual fitness tracking bits, like built-in GPS, heart rate tracking, and automatic sleep tracking, the Ionic also runs Fitbit OS, which gives developers the ability to create apps for the smartwatch.
The Ionic also gets Fitbit Pay in Singapore, for Mastercard and Visa credit and debit card customers with UOB and OCBC bank. It works with contactless payment terminals, or basically any terminal that accepts Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and payWave.
But perhaps its biggest standout features are its long five-day battery life, and the fact that it works across iOS, Android and Windows phones. So, is this the ultimate smartwatch for fitness geeks?
The Fitbit Ionic is really comfortable
The strap that comes with the Ionic is fine, the strap holes provide a basic level of breathability.
I really enjoy wearing the Ionic. It’s thin and light on the wrist, and comfortable enough to wear to sleep. But while I wouldn’t call it ugly, I can’t say its angular lines make it an attractive smartwatch either.
The strap that comes with the Ionic is comfortable enough, and if it was the only band I had I could probably make do. But if I owned an Ionic and could only buy one additional strap, I’d save up for the Horween leather band (S$99). It’s the most comfortable of the three I’ve used; it’s not something you’d want to sweat it but it makes the Ionic look snazzier for everyday wear.
Not something you’d want to sweat in, but the optional leather strap is comfortable and more appropriate for the office.
It’s easy to change the straps out on the Ionic — perhaps a bit too easy. You just press down on a button and the band snaps out, which is likely why the Sports band snapped off my wrist twice during a martial arts practice. That didn’t happen when I did calisthenics and ran, but it does make me think the Ionic wouldn’t work well for all sports.
The optional Sports band is the most breathable tracker band I’ve seen yet; with lots of perforations for airflow.
The 1.42-inch rectangular LCD touchscreen is bright and colorful, but small when you compare it to something like the Apple Watch, which has a 1.65-inch screen (with the 42mm case). There’s quite a bit of chin on the device, and it’s one of the few smartwatches that has a logo stamped on the front. The screen can be slow to respond; raising to wake doesn’t work all the time, and touch controls can lag.
The band that ships with the Ionic actually has an SpO2 sensor that can measure oxygen saturation in the blood. Fitbit says that once it’s ready, the sensor can unlock even more advanced tracking abilities (e.g., sleep apnea), but for now it lies dormant.
The strap that ships with the Ionic has an SpO2 sensor, which currently lies dormant, waiting for the right time to awaken.
I woke up on the fifth morning of wearing the Ionic with 14% of battery life left, after having logged two non-GPS workouts. So I guess Fitbit’s claim of five-day battery life is more or less accurate, although your mileage will vary depending on how you use it.
The Fitbit app is the real star
After wearing the Ionic for a while, it becomes quite clear that it’s really a fitness tracker that has a handful of smart features.
That’s because the smart features are pretty lackluster right now. The Ionic will let you see messages and calls, but you can’t interact with them. You can get calendar notifications but you can’t actually see your calendar. Switching watch faces is a laborious process that requires you to use the Fitbit app to download a face to the Ionic, and rebooting the watch to the new face.
Switching watch faces is a laborious process that involves the app, downloading the face to the Ionic, and rebooting the watch.
The Fitbit smartphone app, on the other hand, really shines. It’s beautifully designed, makes stats easy to understand, and gamifies your stats to motivate you to do better. It’s easily the best fitness tracking app I’ve used — Apple’s Health app offers too little info, for example, while Garmin’s Connect offers more but in a convoluted UI.
The Fitbit app makes it easy to see your key stats on a page, something even the Garmin Connect app is only starting to do with its beta My Day feature.
Let’s look at sleep tracking. The Ionic is able to break sleep down into different sleep stages, but to be honest, knowing how much you spend in REM versus light sleep doesn’t really help you. In the Fitbit app, however, you can see how your sleep stages compare against a benchmark of people your age, so you know if your sleep is going well or needs work. That’s actionable analysis you can actually use.
The Ionic can track your sleep stages, and helps you make sense out of it using benchmarks to determine how well you’re actually sleeping (or not).
I found the Ionic to be pretty accurate at tracking when I woke up and went to sleep. But without access to a proper sleep lab, I can’t determine how accurate the Ionic is at tracking sleep stages. With most consumer fitness trackers, I prefer to view their stats from the point of a hobbyist or fitness enthusiast; to get a generally accurate ballpark of trending performance over time. If you need precise measurements for medical reasons, you should consult with a doctor rather than an consumer electronics salesperson.
The one thing that the Fitbit app doesn’t do well, however, is play nice with the iOS Health app. Unlike an app like Garmin’s Connect, which can write and read to the Health app, the Fitbit app is firewalled. If you only live within Fitbit’s ecosystem, that might not be a problem, but if you buy something like a Nokia Body+ smart scale one day, the measurements won’t show up in the Fitbit app.
The heart of it all
The Fitbit app left a strong impression on me, because making stats usable and engaging is a really difficult thing to do, and the app does it well. Unfortunately, I can’t fully recommend the Ionic as a fitness tracker because its heart tracker wasn’t giving me consistent results.
To be clear, I don’t have a proper heart rate monitor, so I can’t guarantee the veracity of these results. But I tested the Ionic against the Apple Watch Series 3, Garmin fenix 5, and the gym’s treadmill heart rate monitor, and they all provided similar heart rates, while the Ionic would often lag behind, by as much as 10 to 20 beats at times.
The Ionic’s erratic heart tracking happened when I was doing both high-intensity intervals, which ramps heart rates up and down in short bursts, as well as when walking and running on a treadmill, which increases heart rates at a constant pace.
Heart rate tends to be off, when compared to other heart rate trackers, which throws into question the accuracy of other stats that depend on heart rate.
When I wore the Ionic and fenix 5 together for a few days, I noticed that they would both report similar heart rates when I was sitting or resting. But once I started moving, the Ionic’s heart rate tracking would differ from the fenix 5’s again. It’s possible that the Watch, fenix 5, and treadmill were inaccurate together, while the Ionic is the only accurate one. But it’s quite unlikely, so I went to do some reading online to see what other users had to say.
I’m discovered that I’m not the only one who’s had problems with the Ionic’s heart rate accuracy during workouts, but to be fair, athlete and fitness tracker reviewer DC Rainmaker pegs the Ionic’s heart rate monitoring as accurate. Fitbit’s own forums seem to have mixed reviews, so there is likely something going on here with the smartwatch’s heart rate tracking.
If you’re a hardcore athlete, you know that inconsistent heart rate tracking will be a problem, because you won’t be able to accurately gauge if you’re hitting your target heart rate zone. Even if you’re not hardcore, inaccurate heart rate monitoring throws every other stat into question, like your resting heart rate and sleep monitoring.
A box of unrealized potential
The Fitbit Ionic feels like a box of unrealized potential. If only the heart-rate sensor was more consistent. If only you could interact more with notifications. If only there were more apps for Fitbit OS.
These flaws are enough to dissuade me from recommending the Ionic wholeheartedly. It’s a shame too, because Fitbit has the best fitness tracking app I’ve seen on iOS. I’m not a doctor, so I’m taking the app’s analysis and recommendations on faith, but the app manages to make activity tracking fun and understandable in a way that still evades Apple’s Health and Garmin’s Connect apps.
And at S$458, the Ionic is right about what you’d pay for a smartwatch, but Fitbit’s smartwatch is really more of a fitness tracker with a handful of smartwatch features thrown in. If a fitness tracker is what you’re looking for, then you might be better served with a slimmer, less expensive dedicated tracker. If you’re looking for a watch with more smarts, then you might want to look at the Apple Watch or Samsung Gear S3. As it is, the Fitbit Ionic straddles in the odd middle between the two categories, with performance that makes it hard to recommend.
This article was first published on November 7, 2017.
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