The heart-rate sensor is an always flashing green light, which goes some way to explaining why the larger battery doesn’t offer any real gains on my two-year-old Flex. The screen itself is bright and sharp, and offers a handful of different watch faces to customise the information you feel most valuable.įlipping it over reveals a smooth concave design, with a very prominent heart-rate sensor and the four connectors for the proprietary charging dock. It doesn’t look as slick as the Apple Watch, or some of the pricier Android Wear models, but it’s a nice enough timepiece – certainly more stylish than the first generations of Pebbles, despite its boxiness. As mentioned earlier, the brain is bigger here, which is no surprise as it has to encompass a 1.66in, 240 x 180 colour screen, although there’s a reasonably thick bezel on display here too. Previous models had a central “brain” that did all the step counting and held a battery, and a colourful strap to keep it in place. In that respect, it follows past Fitbit design cues. In fact, you have to take out the band to charge the thing, as the watch part pops out of the shell, and sits in a functional square charger: there are no ports here, presumably so as not to harm its water-resistant credentials. The Fitbit Blaze is an attractive device, like a good-looking smartwatch, in part because it’s so damned easy to change the strap. With the Fitbit Blaze, the company has eschewed this policy and made a product that it hopes you’d be happy to wear as jewellery: it’s a smartwatch in all but name. I have owned both the Fitbit Flex and the Fitbit One, both of which subscribed to the view that fitness trackers are best left unseen. But it immediately raises a problem that the Fitbit Blaze has for the serious runner: it needs a working phone to operate with much more utility than the entry-level models at half the price. Now, this could very easily be the fault of my HTC One M8, which often treats maintaining a stable Bluetooth connection as an afterthought. Three kilometres in, when it was finally done – you guessed it – it couldn’t see my phone again. After a few tries it succeeded, but it then decided it was essential that I downloaded a firmware update there and then. Of course, when I found myself on the start line – still hungover but with an hour to acclimatise to my self-inflicted condition – the Fitbit couldn’t find my phone. Best smartwatches of 2018: The best watches to give (and get!) this Christmas

Fitbit blaze