wrote an article last year about how my life has totally changed since I bought a Fitbit and that fact remains true. I wore my gorgeous little Fitbit One nestled snuggly in between by boobies for almost three whole years and I nearly cried whenever I left the house without it. I knew it would take something pretty special to stop me from wearing it and turns out the Apple Watch is it. I ordered one in April because Mr Smaggle is an app developer and he needs me to be onboard with new stuff for testing so I thought I’d give it a go. I had no idea it would soon replace my Fitbit or that I would get so used to wearing a watch so quickly. I literally haven’t worn a watch since I got my first iPhone in 2009 and now I feel totally naked without it. I’m really, really loving the Apple Watch but to condense it’s awesomeness down to a particular category, I’ve written my verdict of Fitbit vs Apple Watch.
Things my Apple Watch does that my FitBit doesn’t
It tacks calorie burn according to my heart rate, movement, weight and height. The Fitbit can estimate a calorie burn but it can’t differentiate between active calories and passive calories. The Apple Watch tracks my exercise calories which the Fitbit couldn’t do. You could manually enter active minutes but you still had to estimate your calorie burn. The Apple Watch just figures it out and it’s awesome.
It taps me to stand up when I’ve been sitting down for too long which was something I was desperate for my Fitbit to do. It’s made such a difference to the way I feel at the end of the day because it reminds when I’ve been idle for too long.
It reminds me to drink water. I’ve tried water reminder apps on my phone before but my phone is often on Do Not Disturb mode. I can set my watch to only let health related notifications through so I have the peace and quiet of my phone being off but I don’t miss out on my stand up and water reminders. This is actually game changing, I’ve been waiting years for something like this.
It has a three-fold goal process. There’s a calorie goal, movement goal and stand goal for each day which I prefer to the basic goal of 10,000 steps. The Apple Watch can account for days where you do an exercise class and burn a lot of calories but you may not have completed your steps which is excellent because this is something that always frustrated me on low step days when I’d been to the gym when using my Fitbit. I do try my hardest to do my full 10,000 steps every day but if I’ve done a step class but only walked 7000 steps the Apple Watch won’t give me grief about it, it just intuitively understands that I’ve moved enough and raised my heart rate enough and grants me my movement goal.
Fitbit doesn’t sync natively with Apple Health. Which is fair enough because they’re a competitor but I may have continued using it if they had.
Things my Fitbit does that my Apple Watch doesn’t
Allows me to share data with friends – the one thing I really miss about my Fitbit is not being able to see and share step goals with friends. It is very motivating to keep my steps up when I know people can see them! I feel it may only be a matter of time before this is an available feature on the Apple Watch though.
It also wasn’t a conscious choice to stop using my Fitbit. I used both for at least a month and I realised all of a sudden I’d gone three days without wearing it my Fitbit. It also just seemed silly to keep using my Fitbit when my Apple Watch did everything it did and more. I mentioned in my previous article that I would never buy a wrist step tracker and I stand by that but I love the Apple Watch is so stylish and does so much more than just track steps, I can’t see myself ever caring about wearing it somewhere fancy, even weddings.
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Do you have an Apple Watch or a Fitbit? Are you considering getting either? Or swapping from a Fitbit to an Apple Watch?
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