FitBit Versa 2 - Live With It - DTNS 3683 (Patreon)

On this special episode of DTNS we host the final "Live With It" for 2019. Sarah shares her experience with FitBit's Versa 2 fitness tracker. This show is audio only. There is no video version.

Starring Sarah Lane, Scott Johnson and Roger Chang

Link to show notes. 

PRODUCTS:

FitBit Versa 2 - $129.95

https://www.fitbit.com/versa

 FIRST IMPRESSIONS:

- it’s bigger than I thought it would be, and not as sleek. But I also have tiny wrists. The watch’s back doesn’t sit flat on my wrist.

- I wish I’d gotten a different color face. The all-black look blends in less than I thought it would. The rubber strap is not breathable. Aside from swimmers or those who need to clean the watch regularly I don’t know who would prefer this material.

- There are other strap options and they can be swapped in and out. In hindsight I should have gotten a gold watch face(which I like better than the black) and just bought a woven band I like, since the gold faces only came with straps I didn’t like. This of course costs more money and leaves you with an extra band you don’t like, but you can definitely mix and match.

- The included band comes in two sizes for different sized wrists. I’ll never need the longer strap… but technically I could use it to wrap the watch around my ankle. That seems ridiculous but I bet people do this? Not sure if it would mess up heart rate stats. It would possibly be more accurate for steps. 

- It comes with a USB charging cord and a dock that the watch snaps into nicely but I couldn’t figure out how to elegantly lay the charger flat on my desk, I guess it just doesn’t, but that’s not a huge problem. I’ve also run out of USB inputs into my Mac mini, so I’ll need another thunderbolt to USB dongle, sigh.

- Battery life out of the box was at 80%. Besides charging the Versa 2 briefly while installing a software update and pairing with my phone, i didn’t charge it. (The next morning after wearing it all night, it was at 48%)

- Pairing with iPhone through the Fitbit app was seamless. 

- I already had a Fitbit account that I apparently both started up and abandoned in 2013, so there were a few stats about my weight and sleep history the app recognized as me and pulled in that confused me at first.  

- Pairing with my Jabra 65t bluetooth earbuds (first Live With It product!) was clunky. I had to disconnect the Jabras from my iPhone and try to pair with the Versa a few times but eventually it worked and they all communicate with each other now. 

- MacOS Fitbit Connect app is what I have to use to get podcasts or music onto my Versa 2. The app is buggy but I was able to add podcasts to a playlist successfully. The problem is that it has to pull downloaded media from iTunes folders so it’s an inelegant solution, you can’t just drag and drop covert art from the iTunes app. And because it’s collected in a playlist form you can’t just add a new podcast series and have episodes populate, you have to specifically add episodes or music and stack them in the order you want. (You can skip around and shuffle on the go but there’s less control)

- Two big issues with adding media to the Versa 2 aside of the MacOS Fitbit Connect app being clunky:

1. All the music I own is outdated, I only subscribe to Apple Music now, before that it was Rdio, so getting fresh music onto the Versa 2 in the way I want to hear it is impossible.

2. Apple Music isn’t even supported, although Spotify is - but again, it’s still limited to playlists. 

Takeway: The implication of having local media on the watch is that you don’t want to have to bring your phone with you. But that cuts off access to all the other apps I’m used to having when I’m out and about. I can’t take phone calls, or get messages, or read email, or read Twitter…. This would be ok once in a while but requires a lot more prep and task management for me than just heading out the door. Obviously some workouts, like swimming or biking where it would be more difficult to deal with a phone and you require less interruption, would work better here. I’d be curious to hear if anyone has solutions other than what Fitbit has provided here.

- The Fitbit Coach app is buggy, slow, hard to log into, and everything is behind a paywall. I never used it. However, if you were serious about a health and fitness regime and willing to pay a subscription fee for the content, having remote “coaches” leading you through various workouts seems cool. 

- My first night of sleep tracking I got a score of 86! I set my ideal sleep time to 8 hours, with bedtime at 10:30 pm, and wake up time at 6:30 am. I thought the watch was going to remind me to go to bed and wake me up, but I didn’t get any notifications. In the morning I woke up before 6:30 and the watch had gone into a no display mode of some kind, I guess to save battery.

- After wearing the watch for half a day and sort of hating how the weight and material felt, I thought I was going to have a hard time sleeping with it, but it actually didn’t bother me. I was also really tired. 

- Logging food is not my thing, but I gave it a try for at least a week to get some stats. I told Fitbit I didn’t want to lose any weight, just maintain my current weight and got a lot of praise in the app. I assume a high number of users are actually trying to lose weight. I abandoned the food log after about a week. It didn’t seem very precise to me and felt cumbersome. 

- Am I the only person who doesn’t really care how many steps I take in a day? What if I just take really shallow steps, or really big strides? My overall distance per day is the metric I want. For example, if I ran or walked 5 miles today, I’ll be happy. There’s some customization in the app and the watch interface to give that more emphasis and reorder some stats, which I did. Now when I look at my stats, distance is at the top. Step count was the default. 

- There are a ton of alternative watch faces for the main face to install, many of which aren’t free, and that isn’t always obvious in the Fitbit app until after you’ve installed the face and it prompts you to pay from the watch face itself. I found that frustrating and stopped installing them altogether. Thankfully Fitbit’s own face is one of the nicest and you have some color customization out of the gate. 

MID-REVIEW THOUGHTS:

- I got used to the size of the watch and the strap material. It’s waterproof down to I believe 8 feet, easy to wipe down, and honestly I just stopped taking it off. I showered with it by accident a couple times because I got so used to it being on my wrist. A soapy Versa 2 is probably a bad idea but nothing negative happened. 

- Even though the text is really small and often a longer message gets cut off, it’s really handy to read a text at a glance from the watch. Again, my phone has to be with me but it almost always is. I see why people love smartwatches for this simple convenience. 

- I had one strange incident where the watch face time and date was suddenly wrong and showed two days in the past. It was after the watch had run out of battery, not that it should matter, but it was a strange glitch. After I recharged it, it reset and has been normal since. 

(UPDATE - the exact same issue happened the day of my review! Really random. I thought it was a one-time issue. It is now a two-time issue).

- Speaking of charging, the Versa 2 is in that awkward spot of needing to be charged roughly every five days. That’s nice long battery life, but just long enough for me to forget once in a while. I got myself into the habit of charging it during DTNS recordings, when I knew I wouldn’t be active for a couple hours anyway. 

- It’s honestly a good motivator. If I haven’t gotten in enough steps in a given hour that the Versa 2 calculates that I need in order to meet my daily goal, it’ll encourage me ten minutes before the hour to take a few more steps. I’ve cheated a few times and just waved my arms around and gotten my accolades. Don’t tell Fitbit. 

- Prior to the Versa 2, I used Apple’s Heath iOS app to track my daily distance. The Versa 2 definitely rounds up a bit (or the Health app rounds down). A regular walk that I knew to be 1.2 miles is now 1.5. 

- I set the Versa 2 to auto-detect when I was running, one of several options I had to just let it record my activities. Somewhat regularly it would detect a “jog” when I wasn’t actually jogging, usually during a hike, but definitely not a jog. It would be nice to be able to record speed tests during setup so that the Versa 2 could more accurately filter walking, hiking, or jogging gait.

- I loved looking at my sleep stats every morning, but sometimes I knew they weren’t accurate. For example, I might have been in bed for 7 hours but I knew I was up tossing and turning and worrying about taxes between 2-3 am and the Versa didn’t recognize that. 

- Fitbit has all sorts of exercise subscriptions that would be awesome to play around with, but it’s extra money each month. Now that my main studio is in a big garage with ample space, I’ve thought about subscribing to Fitbit Coach, mounting a TV, and doing yoga or strength training in here. That requires money and personal accountability though. And I didn’t have a great experience with Fitbit Coach before. 

OVERALL THOUGHTS:

- A common complaint is that the Versa 2 doesn’t integrate enough with iOS. I’ve never had an Apple Watch but I felt like I got all the stats I cared about. If anything, I didn’t take advantage of some cool features. Besides lack of cell service, it feels pretty functional. 

- With a few different bands in various colors and textures, I could make this more of a fashion item. Changing out the bands is easy enough, and there’s a lot of variety on Fitbit’s website. I still wish I would have chosen a gold face, but I’m also obsessed with everything gold. 

- The overall size and form factor no longer bothers me and after not wearing a watch for a decade, I love glancing down to see the time and lots of other goodies, rather than fumbling for my phone. 

- I suspect after reading this review, many will say the Versa 2 is much more of a fitness tracker than a smart watch. Text message alerts, activity, sleep tracking, heart rate info, calendar notifications, that’s what it does best. 

- There are a smattering of handy 3rd party apps that can be onboarded onto the Versa 2, such as the Uber app. But the text is so small and images so limited I rarely used them. 

****I love the Versa 2. It’s really become a part of my bod and I love the stats. But it’s a little buggy. In my experience the bugginess seems to be directly related to letting it fully run the battery out, although 90% of the time it was fine afterward

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