I’m considering replacing a lost Charge HR with a Fitbit Blaze or Apple Watch and looking for some input/helpful suggestions (rants) from the group. Thanks!
Apple Background:
I own apple products (laptop/iphone) but not a diehard fanboy. Wife now, after using and enjoying her Fitbit Charge HR for months has an apple watch. I purchased it for her for christmas, so the switch really was my own doing. She loves it (the apple watch).
Fitbit background:
I owned (until recently lost) a Fitbit Surge HR and still own Aria scale. I really enjoyed the sleep tracking of the watch, small telephone notifications and continue to enjoy the weight tracking through the scale. I did, for the first 5-6 months of ownership track food and other intake through the Fitbit App but that kinda peeled off in the few months before the watch was lost. Enjoyed the overall daily HR monitoring as well.
I track all exercise through other equipment (Garmin Watches/Bike computers) so its not used for any workout tracking. Its more I enjoy having a watch that is (reasonably) well designed and offers some qualify functions in terms of overall fitness/fatigue tracking. Do I feel like shit today? …oh looks like my sleeping habits have been crap for the past few nights… etc etc… I find that helpful/interesting.
One important point that I’d like comment on, is that my wife needs to charge her apple watch every day (or two if lucky). The Fitbit Blaze appears to last upwards of five days. Thats a big plus in my book.
Anyone out there make a switch between… have some pros/cons? I’ve surfed through the various sites (DC rainmaker, nerdwallet, etc etc)…
Thanks!!!
Garmin Vivoactive HR
This will be my next purchase in September. I will wait to see if any new product I can’t live without is announced at InterBike, and then I will pull the trigger. It interfaces with the Fitbit Aria scale I also own. My biggest information retrieval comes from the sleep monitor, which since menopause has been a game changer, and not in a good way 
Since my 920XT completely stopped working 2 months after the warranty expired, I am hesitant to again buy the latest, best, most expensive device. The Vivoactive does SBR and I expect will go several days on a single charge, although not 8-10 days as my current model does without HR feature built in.
If you can hold off a bit there are strong rumors that the Apple Watch 2 will have it’s own GPS chip as well as a barometer. Speculation is that it will be announced in early September.
I would be “all in” for the Apple watch if it was announced that it was absolutely safe and approved for swimming. Last week, I gave a swim lesson to an Apple engineer who was on his way to Cupertino. He wore his Apple watch during the entire lesson (one hour in the pool). Afterwards, he proved that it still worked, although current warranty does NOT cover water damage at this time.
He told me that his mandate was to make the gaskets ocean-safe and oblivious to salt. I showed him my Garmin device, for which he had no answer. It’s as if Apple has no idea that there are other products on the market from which they can learn, especially when they are very late to the party…
I have an AW. Its strengths are the notifications, it looks pretty good, music control, custom apps, and Apple Pay. However, the Apple Watch is horrible at activity tracking. It captures the same data, but it fails to do anything useful with it. Want to know your resting HR, can’t do it with the AW. You can look at daily HR min/max in Health, but the low could have been a bad reading (common with the AW) or it could truly have been a minimum. Sleep tracking, no can do. There are apps for that, but they are mediocre, and the watch really cannot support the battery life.
Any basic tracker with HR is superior to the AW at a fraction of the cost.
I have a Garmin 735XT also, and I wore it 24/7 leading up to my last HIM. I really fell in love with its activity tracking and sleep tracking features. If I continue to wear the AW, I may buy a cheap HR tracker, like the Garmin vivosmart HR to wear on my other wrist. The Apple watch is that bad.