- Improved heart rate tracking
- Sleek and lightweight
- All-week battery life
- Some tracking metrics paywalled behind Fitbit Premium
- YouTube Music the only option
- No altimeter for those who like adventure sports
The Fitbit Charge 3 was the first wearable device I ever picked up, so it was fitting I was testing the new Charge 6 when I found myself stuck in a post-holiday season fitness rut.
It feels like a familiar arc. At the start of each year, you're energised, you're hitting all your goals and making swift progress. Then, there's a winter lull and slowly old (bad) habits creep back in. It's a constant process of taking two steps forward and one step back. Overall you make headway but you face bumps along the way.
This non-linear fitness "journey" is mirrored by Fitbit's Charge tracker itself. The Charge 6 makes some advances while also pulling back from broad market appeal with its inclusion of solely Google apps.
Choose your own fitness adventure
When you set your Charge 6 up you're asked to choose a "Focus" from being more active, better sleep, weight management, stress management, or improving your heart health. This then determines which metric gets the biggest icon as well as the next three most important metrics for sticking with that goal. You can choose a custom Focus too. I opted for being more active which highlighted daily steps, Active Zone Minutes, kilometres, and calories.
The Fitbit Charge 6 isn't just for tracking your exercise it covers a wide range of metrics. It tracks the hours you sleep, skin temperature, and oxygen saturation. Short of a current score displayed on the device most of the data is accessed via reports in the app.
Active Zone Minutes are an attempt at gamification. The Charge 6 tracks one Active Zone Minute when your heart rate reaches the fat-burning zone and two Minutes when you're in the cardio or peak zones. The zones themselves are calculated as a percentage of your own maximum heart rate. For all intents and purposes, Active Zone Minutes are probably the more important metric for keen fitness enthusiasts - it's the metric that really tracks your exercise performance. I just wanted to get back on track with some consistency, so opted to focus on a 10,000-step goal.
The tracker can auto-detect a few standard workouts after 15 minutes including walking and running. That's great for someone like me who can easily forget to manually start a workout. The Charge 6's heart rate tracking is said to be 60% more accurate than previous models. Compared to an Apple Watch SE (2022) I found it to be more or less on par; usually about 2 BPM out. Either both were way off or Fitbit's claims are true. Connecting to gym equipment via Bluetooth for heart rate monitoring is now available but serious hikers and adventurer sports enthusiasts may bemoan the lack of an altimeter. Two steps forward, one step back.
The tracker itself is sleek and stylish, it's super lightweight which makes it comfortable to wear to bed. There are a wide variety of often bold clock faces to choose from and most offer some basic customisation on the 1.4-inch display. A proper button returns to the device, haptic this time, and it's nice and responsive. While the screen is right-sized for this type of tracker it means you do end up using the app more itself more often.
Getting tripped up
Upon first opening many reports on the Fitbit app, there's usually some kind of explainer for how the data is being collected, what it means and standard waivers. I appreciated the hand-holding and education.
Unlike Apple's Health app, some metrics are tucked away behind a $ 14.99 per month or $129.99 per year paywall. Although, you do get six months of free Fitbit Premium. Paywalled features include a Daily Readiness Story (which suggests you're either ready to workout or should take a rest day), detailed sleep score, detailed stress management score, wellness report as well as workout videos and recipes. None of these are particularly essential but the readiness score (based on a mix of recent activity, sleep and heart rate variability) is at least an effort by Fitbit to provide additional recommendations with all the data it's collecting on your behalf.
Being a tracker and not a full-sized smartwatch without auxiliary buttons there is a fair bit of tapping and swiping needed to operate it how you want. The various apps are displayed in one long infinite gallery accessed by swiping left or right from the home screen. Bizarrely, there hasn't been a way to rearrange them in the past few Charge models. The Workouts app for example comes with two swipes to the right, past the Notifcations app. This seems like it would be an easy fix if the tracker had more precise taps, say two apps per "screen" but most buttons take up the full interface.
Fitness trackers are meant to provide motivation, some might say the act of wearing one is motivation enough. But I found the Charge 6 doesn't offer enough encouragement for you to hit your goals. There's a "reminder to move" notification that goes off 10 minutes before the hour is up if you haven't completed 250 steps and appropriate notifications to celebrate completing a goal but overall I found the Charge 6 to be pretty quiet. There's a lack of personalised messages like "you've only got 2,000 steps left to go for the day" or "you've made it halfway to your goal". Encouraging messages like these could provide a positive feedback loop, a reminder that you're almost there. Without them, there's a lot more cognitive load on the user which I found can tend to manifest as negative self-talk or a feeling that the goal is too far out of reach.
24/7 tracking
One of the things I love most about the Charge 6 is its all-week battery life. I've missed out on sleep tracking frequently because I've had to put a smartwatch on to charge at the end of the day. With the Charge 6, I could comfortably get through seven days of use and still have 5-10% battery life left. You're prompted at 20% battery life to put it on to charge, so I never found myself running short. This is with the always-on screen switched off. I found the always-on setting to be a waste of battery life, it shortens it by about half and the tracker is already nice and responsive with a "raise to wake" action there's no need for it. Charging is quick too, it reaches a full charge from around 15% in just over an hour. I've found having a dependable battery life is imperative, if you're anything like me you'd rather spend 30 minutes charging your tracker than taking a walk without it. Every step counts.
The charging experience itself isn't frictionless. The cable measures about 45cm which means putting it on charge can sometimes be a weird experience as the cable is nearly pulled taut meaning it was safer to charge it on the floor rather than have it sit precariously on my bedside. The magnetisation between the tracker and the charger isn't as strong either and it has to be oriented one way which I found fiddly compared to more typical rounded smartwatch chargers which firmly snap on.
Fitbit Charge 6 or Pixel Watch Lite?
Fitbit's acquisition by Google was completed in 2021, so it's no surprise that the company is starting to become more in line with the rest of the ecosystem. The Fitbit account has been phased out so you'll need to make a Google account if you don't already have one. I found converting my legacy account over (so I could keep past data) easy enough.
The Charge 6 technically works with both Android and Apple devices but it caters more to the Android side of the market with integrations for Google Wallet, Google Maps, and YouTube Music. Google Wallet is your only option for payments. Google Maps is the only way to navigate. And unless you’re a YouTube Music subscriber, you can’t even hit pause on your music or podcast from the Charge 6. It’s a Pixel Watch Lite in all but name.
Aside from these few extra apps and the standard ones that ship with the device, there isn't much more to it, it's still firmly in tracker territory. This is quite freeing, apart from text and email notifications (if you opt-in) you're not bombarded by the constant deluge of Instagram and Messenger notifications.
Fitbit Charge 6 - Final Thoughts
The Charge fitness tracker is at an interesting stage in the product life cycle. Gym equipment integration is a gain but you lose the altimeter. The Charge 5 didn't have music playback controls after support for Spotify was dropped. Music returns on the Charge 6 but only for YouTube Music. The side button is back but the company haven't made efforts to improve how you navigate the device.
As for myself, I didn't manage to hit my 10,000-step goal every single day. Things trended in the right direction from an average of 8,500 steps per day at the start and nearly 9,500 steps now. It's quite possible I would've reached my goal if there had been more frequent encouragement along the way. At the end of the day, I guess Fibit and I are still working on being the best versions of ourselves we can be.
For its price and comprehensive range of trackables, it remains one of the better options out there. Especially when the Google Pixel Watch retails for $649 or the budget Apple Watch SE goes for $399. If you want the tracking features without full smartwatch functionality then getting the Charge 6 is a no-brainer.
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Dylan Crismale
Digital Content Editor
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