7 Things You Should Know About Fitbit Charge 5

Fitbit Charge 5; Today I have a comprehensive review of the new Fitbit Charge 5. Also included are seven new facts about this unit. 

I've been using it for a while, so I'm pretty sure I know where it works well and where there are some significant trade-offs. Some trade-offs I've never seen in over a decade of reviewing watches and devices.

What can the Fitbit Charge 5 do?

Before we get into the 7 New Things, let's talk about the price. It costs $179 USD. A six-month subscription to the Fitbit Premium service is included.

That essentially gets you more advanced data as well as some of the recommendations. Only one of the features I'll discuss today requires Fitbit Premium, but you may want it for other reasons as well.

After the six-month free trial, it's $10 per month, or $80 per year. So, now that the pricing is out of the way, let's talk about the new features, the most obvious of which is the new AMOLED display.

1. The new amoled screen

You can see it right now because it is very bright. Fitbit claims it's two times brighter, and it's true; unlike in the past, you can actually see this thing in full sunlight.

It is currently sunny outside. I just finished running, and the sun is shining brightly outside. I am finally pleased with the charge display while working out outside.

It is now a touch-screen display, which means you swipe through it with your finger. The main dashboard is shown here. I can change the metrics along the bottom and side of this dashboard by tapping it.

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So, 10,400 steps and my heart rate was 88 [BPM]. And as I continue to tap it, you can see that there are 2600 calories so far, and this bar, of course, increases on the left-hand side.

You'll notice that the screen dims when I stop touching it, which is because it's currently in always-on mode. So it saves battery power in between my taps. 

To proceed, I simply tap it again, and it wakes up again, and you can iterate through these metrics again.

Those are my Active Zone Minutes right there at 90 Steps, heart rate, and I can swipe up to get to my daily dashboard, where you can see 10,000 steps, 6.46 miles, and 90 Active Zone Minutes.

There's my hourly activity for this hour, followed by my current heart rate; my sleep last night wasn't as hot or as strong. My sleep score is 68/Fair, which is right below it. That appears to be optimistic.

It was a dreadful night, but I'll...sure Fitbit. That concludes my SpO2 reading for the evening. So far, my exercise of the days in the number of the week. So two out of five days this week, which is near the bottom of the list.

I can go back up to the top here, and then I can swipe to the right, and you can see there's a text from my wife. I'm free to go again. 

There's the exercise; this is where I'd start one. I can swipe through the various exercise modes available on the watch, and you can customize or change these modes slightly.

You can't change the display metrics within them, but you can display it as an auto app, for example, and then when I tap a mode like this, it will connect to GPS either through my phone or through the built-in gps.

Back on the touch screen, there are a few options. To begin with, it is not set to always on by default, which means that every time I put my wrist like this, it will turn off.

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The screen will actually fully turn off and then turn back on when I raise my wrist, and to fitbit's credit, this is the best fitbit I've tested yet in terms of gesture recognition.

The fact that when I raise it like this, it goes to full brightness or turns on now if you want to turn it on to the always on mode for 24 7 usage you can do that within that you even have the option to turn it off overnight and you can configure that whether it's from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. like the defaults or something else

Of course, turning on the always-on display will significantly drain your battery. There are also three more options for display brightness levels, whether you want it to be always on or not, as well as how long the display stays on before switching back to dim or completely off. Finally, usability while wet is an option.

It's actually not that bad, I've been pleasantly surprised by this so usability like while running sweaty all that kind of stuff no problems at all it doesn't generally false positive trip in the shower for my testing though there is a water lock option that you can enable if you're having issues with that.

Now the next one is similar to the first one but it's different and it's actually probably my favorite feature in terms of functionality which is the always-on display for just workouts 

In my case the majority of my testing time i kept the defaults which means the display is off my wrist is down and it turns on my wrist raises up but for workouts i like the display on the entire time and the charge 5 introduces the always on display for workouts.

It will use more battery, but it will always be there even if you just glance at it at an off angle without having to raise your wrist fully if you enable this for workouts, it will return to your normal display settings for the rest of the day next.

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There is a new eda sensor. sensor of electrodermal activity. Fitbit introduced this on the Versa 3 and the Sense about a year ago, and we're now seeing it move down to the Charge 5.

Essentially, you sit down, get comfortable, and swipe into the menus on the right hand side until you get to the eda sensor, then you keep swiping and swiping and there we go.

Then you tap it to begin with, then you hold on to both sides of it, and then you sit here for three minutes doing nothing at the end of the three minutes.

They'll ask you how you felt, how calm you are, and then it'll show your heart rate progress over that time frame. Now, behind the scenes, more than just your heart rate is being tracked.

It's actually tracking three different metrics, and those metrics only appear in the Fitbit app, so you have to see them there, and then you can trend and plot those over time to see how you're feeling. Finally, this is tracking stress.

Unfortunately, this feature is not yet available. Fitbit says it will be available soon, but they refuse to specify whether that will be in December or next week.

Typically, soon for Fitbit means November or so, but we'll have to see, so I'll explain how it works and then once this feature is released it is founded on three factors. 

One is your activity levels in comparison to your norm, two is your sleep but weighted within the last three nights to establish a trend, and three is your hrv score. the variability of your heart rate.

Takes all of that information and assigns you a readiness score for the day; the higher the score, the better prepared you are; the lower the score, the better prepared you are to recover.

From there, it'll recommend a workout for the day that changes based on intensity and duration based on that score, uh, and if the score is low enough, which means sucky enough.

Then it'll give you some more passive recovery type stuff to do, like stretching, yoga, and so on, to try to get your body back in shape for the next day. This sounds similar to what whoop does with the recovery score or what Garmin does with their body battery score.

So I'm interested in delving deeper into it to see how it works. The one caveat is that with Fitbit, this feature does require subscription, which is true for both the daily readiness score and the workout suggestions.

Okay, next up is an easy one, a non-technical one, which is the band's thinness. The thinness of the charge five is 10% thinner than the charge four, and it certainly feels a little bit thinner as well, but more importantly, the band that comes with the stock band is 10% thinner.

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The band that comes free in the box and does not suck on the charge 4 I hated this band because it wasn't as flexible as I wanted it to be and it frequently caught my arm hair in there.

I really like the new Charge 5 band, so kudos to Fitbit for starting with a good band, and then we have another feature that isn't yet available, which is the ecg feature. This is something that fitbit rolled out a year ago on the fitbit sense and is now on the charge five as well. 

Fitbit says that it will be available soon, but it should work the same way as the fitbit sense, which means that you go ahead and hold both sides of it for a given time period, probably 15 to 30 seconds, and then it produces an ecg plot based on that plot.

It will attempt to detect afib and then provide you with a pdf export that you can give to your doctor. As previously stated, that feature is not yet available on the charge 5 today but is quote coming soon but I expect that to work exactly the same as it does on the sense because of how regulated this particular feature is. 

Fitbit Charge 5 added high and low heart rate notifications

Next, they've added high and low heart rate notifications outside of a workout. So, by default, you can set a low heart rate notification and a high heart rate notification in the Fitbit app; these are set in the mid-40s and at 120, respectively.

When you go beyond that, which could be just walking around, you'll get a notification on your wrist indicating whether you have a high or low heart rate.

The battery life in the case of the older charge comes next. Four fitbit said that was about four to five days, while charge five claims up to seven days of battery life.

I don't think so, and I don't see how that's possible right now. Granted, I've been doing actual workouts outside, which reduces battery life a little bit, but I'd say I'm more likely to be trending towards four to five days without a workout than seven days, but it may be possible down the road as they optimize.

This a little bit more, but it's still not that bad to charge it essentially twice a week, and with that we get to the last one, which is that fitbit has significantly changed the gps design on this watch compared to the charge four, and that impacts directly heart rate accuracy.

It also has an effect on GPS accuracy, which I found to be quite significant in my testing, and the long and short of it is that you get to choose. 

There is almost no middle ground in there if you want to have accurate or any gps at all or if you want to have accurate heart rate.

So when I first started testing the charge five, I had some gps issues, specifically that it was horrifically slow to find gps and then horrifically bad. When it finally got GPS, I went back to Fitbit and said, "Hey, what's the deal with this?" We had conference calls and everything, and they said I was wearing it too tight.

I was wearing it like any other GPS watch out there; I've been doing this for over a decade and I'm pretty good at it; it's not too difficult, but they said I needed to be able to put my finger fully underneath the sensor, and this has enough space to do that.

Of course, the problem with that is that a loose band like this means the optical heart rate sensor will struggle to produce accurate results, which was indeed the case, so I followed that advice and went outside to loosen it up.

I went for a run, and while I had no trouble relocating my GPS, my heart rate was useless in some cases, 50 beats per minute off, and I mean way off, like not even in the same realm of off that I can possibly imagine.

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So I said, "Well, that's not going to work," and returned to them, "Hey, what's the dealio?" and said, "Try other band settings," and so I went for a run a couple nights ago, and I iterated this entire run alternating different strap settings.

So I was basically tightening up one notch at a time, trying to find the sweet spot where I could maintain gps as well as heart rate accuracy, and I couldn't do it.

There was one position on the second notch right there that allowed me to basically slide my finger under here but not under the middle part, and that allowed me to get decent gps and an okay heart rate as long as I didn't add intensity or a sprint, but the second I started adding intensity or a sprint, the gps and heart rate dropped dramatically. I would lose heart rate, so I went back to them. 

We had another call, and they said to try the sport band instead because it might be a little more flexible and allow a little more room for the gps, which is probably the most important part.

The way this band works is that the GPS is below the actual display, which isn't that unusual; it's the antenna that matters, and the antenna is part of the case, which is also pretty normal; however, in this case, it sounds like portions of the antenna are also located along this bottom edge right there.

So when I pull this into my wrist like this to tighten a strap to what I consider a normal level of tightness, you actually lose gps, and there's no better way to demonstrate that.

Than my run today a very simple run but not too complicated and for the first seven minutes I started off with the recommended finger ping I guess where the finger could fit under there it was loose like they wanted it but I got gps and for the first seven minutes gps was spot on no problems in the forest whatsoever but my heart rate lost the plot. 

So, for the next four or five minutes, I tightened it one notch on the sport band; the GPS continued to function normally, but the heart rate was completely lost.

So I said fine, I'll go up another notch, and from then on my heart rate was absolutely beautiful and the GPS was gone forever for the rest of the run, even though the watch told me otherwise. 

Before we go any further, you should know that after a week and a half of all the problems, Fitbit sent out another unit in hail mary, but here I am on this run and I can tell you unequivocally that it is just as bad as the first one. It's been miles since I've had gps, and I'm looking exactly like the first unit was in this vast clearing with no gps.

I literally can't get gps out here in the middle of a massive empty space, and it's even loosened down to the second last notch, demonstrating that once you lose gps, everything else falls apart. It's all over for the entire run, so I'm not sure how to reconcile those two. 

There is no other watch on the market that requires you to have a completely loose flopping around device in order to have functional GPS, and no other company, including Fitbit, would say that's acceptable for any of their other devices; that's simply not how devices work.

Now, for some people, that trade-off won't matter; if you want to use your phone for gps, for example, with the charge 5, you can do so; just tighten this thing up and your heart rate will be fine; use your phone for gps and life will be fine.

Now we don't know whether or not fitbit could fix us in firmware updates, though I strongly doubt it, at least for the gps side, which seems to be a very hardware focused thing given how they designed the antenna on the case itself on the heart right side.

It's possible, but it's going to be extremely difficult to overcome the gap required for the GPS to work in order to get a good heart rate signal there, especially on any high intensity sort of stuff, so that's all I've got.

Why is Fitbit Charge 5 better than Fitbit Charge 4?

Has a temperature sensor: A temperature sensor allows you to monitor temperature changes in order to measure your exertion levels and avoid hyperthermia.

Bluetooth is a wireless technology standard that allows data transfers between devices in close proximity by using short-wavelength, ultra-high frequency radio waves. Data transfers are faster in newer versions.

1.3mm thinner: A thinner chassis is preferable to us because it makes the product more compact and portable. Thinness is a feature emphasized by many mobile device manufacturers, but it is essential for a wide range of products. 11.2 mm versus 12.5 mm. 

1.72x greater pixel density: Pixel density is a measure of screen resolution expressed as the number of pixels per inch (PPI) on the screen. A higher pixel density results in more clarity and sharpness for the images rendered on the screen, improving the viewing experience. 189 ppi vs 326 ppi

Has a built-in camera remote control function: The device can remotely control your smartphone's camera (without installing third-party apps), allowing you to take photos even when your phone isn't nearby.

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Has a gyroscope: A gyroscope is a sensor that tracks a device's orientation by measuring the angular rotational velocity. Originally, they were constructed with a spinning rotor to detect changes in orientation, such as twisting or rotation.

Has ECG technology: ECG stands for electrocardiogram and measures the electrical activity of the heartbeat, providing a more comprehensive picture of heart health than blood pressure alone. Please keep in mind that this feature may not be available in all markets.

5°C higher maximum operating temperature: The highest temperature at which the device will perform optimally. 45°C versus 40°C. 

In the end, these were the top 7 things you should know about Fitbit Charge 5. Do not forget to tell us your opinion in the comments.