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Fitbit Blaze reviewed: A totally unnecessary tracker with a few cool features

It's not a bad device, I just don't know why it exists.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn.

When Fitbit announced the Blaze "smart fitness watch," it did not make the best first impression. Many thought the Blaze was a peculiar answer to its competition, namely the Apple Watch, and the company's stock immediately fell more than 13 percent.

However, the Fitbit Blaze is not a smartwatch in the same way as the Apple Watch or the Android Wear. Fitbit took what it does best—connected fitness—and put it in a device designed to appeal to the ever growing number of people interested in smartwatches. But if the idea of fun applications and sending texts from your wrist intrigues you, the $199 Blaze is not what you want. Instead, the Blaze creates and fills a weird middle-ground space. This is a wearable for the die-hard Fitbit crowd, particularly those on the more active side of the spectrum. The Fitbit Blaze is for those who want to wear something that does just slightly more than an average step counter.

Design: Imitation watch

When I was at a birthday party, someone saw my wrist and asked, "Did you get an Apple Watch too?" Even she couldn't tell the difference between the Apple Watch strapped to her wrist and the Blaze on mine. (She lost interest when I set her straight.) Anything that looks like an Apple Watch demands attention because it looks like an Apple product. Whether or not that's what Fitbit intended with its uninspired design for the Blaze, it has definitely succeeded in making A Thing You Confuse for An Apple Watch.

That being said, the Blaze does fit in with the rest of the Fitbit fitness tracker family. Its octagonal, silver case holds a black module with a screen. On that case are three buttons: one back button on the left and two multipurpose buttons on the right that let you control the screen. Like most Fitbit wristbands, the Blaze has a ribbed elastomer strap with a watch-style clasp. Unlike the $250 Surge, you can customize your Blaze by removing the small pins that lock the strap into the case. Classic elastomer straps are $29 each, and Fitbit offers a metal-link band for $129 and a couple different colored leather bands for $99 each.

Many of Fitbit's trackers come in different colors, but thanks to those metal and leather accessories, the Blaze is being pushed as one of the company's more fashionable fitness devices. Along with the slim new Alta tracker, the Blaze is Fitbit's way of telling us that it can do style without designers like Tory Burch.

I'm not sure the effort has been a success. While the Blaze is surprisingly lightweight, it's too bulky in all the wrong ways. If it had been designed as a circle, like a traditional watch, I might feel differently. However, the Blaze's eight-sided design draws too much attention to itself, and the real shame is that the brains of the device are smaller. The module with the Blaze's color LCD display sits in the middle of the case, leaving open space between it and the frame on its top and bottom.

This design is what lets you move the module in between frames and bands, and unfortunately it also allows you to charge the device. The Blaze comes with a proprietary charging cable with a square pocket on one end into which you slip the module. This means you have to remove the module completely from the frame to charge it, which is super annoying. Thankfully, a full charge will last about five to seven days so you won't have to do this every night. I cringed every time I had to force the Blaze module back into the frame.

Features: What Fitbit does best with a dash of smartwatch

Let's talk about the Blaze's handful of smartwatch-esque features before diving into its fitness abilities. Unlike the Apple Watch and Android Wear, which send all of your smartphone alerts to your wrist, the Blaze only deals with call, text, and calendar alerts. There is no compatibility with third-party chat apps like Whatsapp, Kik, and GroupMe. In general, I prefer a less-is-more approach to smartwatch notifications. But while I was happy that my wrist buzzed every time I got a text or iMessage from my parents, I wish the Blaze was equipped to receive my boyfriend's Whatsapp messages.

Fitbit's "silent" notifications are definitely quiet, and they're easy to disable with a quick tap on the touchscreen. Same goes for alarms—you can set silent alarms to go off for any occasion during the day and dismiss them the same way. The only other "smartwatch" feature is music control, which is something most high-end fitness watches already have anyway. By either swiping down from the top of the screen or long-pressing the top right button, you can access a music player that lets you play, pause, skip, and adjust the volume of the music playing from your smartphone.

The bread and butter of the Blaze is fitness. It's an everyday tracker, so it monitors steps, calories, distance, floors climbed, active minutes, and sleep. It has a continuous optical heart rate monitor embedded into the underside as well, which measures your pulse whenever the band is on. You can tap the clock view on the display to see a live reading of your heart rate whenever you want, and it's also always on during workouts. The Blaze's HRM was usually within 5 bpm of what I calculated with my fingers on a pressure point. I also like that the Blaze categorizes your heart rates into "fat burn," "cardio," and "peak" zones so you can push yourself harder depending on what you want from your workout.

The main difference between the $200 Blaze and the $250 Surge is that the Surge has built-in GPS to monitor your workout route, while the Blaze must use your phone's GPS. Onboard GPS has become the "I'm not messing around" feature for fitness trackers. Since it requires a stand-alone chip, onboard GPS also makes those devices bigger, more power-hungry, and usually more expensive than those with connected GPS only.

Like most of Fitbit's other devices, you can track and log all kinds of exercises, including running, walking, treadmill and elliptical sessions, weight lifting, or general workout moves. The Blaze also has the ability to auto-recognize and record a number of those exercises, and you can customize its threshold for doing so. For example, I work out on ellipticals and treadmills often, so I can set the Blaze to auto-record both of those workouts when I've been doing them for 10 minutes or more.

The first time I tried this, I was confused because I assumed the device would buzz or do something to let me know it had started tracking my elliptical session after I hit the 10-minute mark. However, the Blaze stays silent—when you open the Fitbit app and sync the device next, you'll see your automatically recorded session under the workouts tab. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the auto-recognition feature worked really well. The Blaze accurately recorded the duration of my workouts, and it closely matched the distance and calorie burn that the gym machines estimated. Ironically, it was slightly better at matching calorie expenditure than distance, often being about a half mile off my actual distance.

If you're ever in a workout rut or just want to switch things up, you'll likely lean on the few on-screen workouts provided by FitStar. These are similar to the Microsoft Band's guided workouts, although there aren't nearly as many with the Blaze. Currently the device has a warm up routine, the 7 Minute Workout, and a routine called 10 Minute Abs. That's it. According to a Fitbit forum post, there's no news on when we could see more FitStart on-screen workouts added to the Blaze, which is disheartening because I really enjoyed them. The Blaze makes use of its larger LCD display and shows a small human figure that models each exercise in the routine. So even if you don't know all of the exercises in a routine, you can still do it and follow along by glancing at your wrist.

Listing image by Valentina Palladino

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