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Comment by rainforest | Hacker News Reader

I'm not so optimistic. FitBit's business model is to distinguish price bands by software features like printer manufacturers. Pebble's is to provide the same experience, enhanced by better hardware to everyone. Pebble still do this at a pricepoint near the entry-level FitBits.

I can't imagine FitBit wanting to continue to keep a competitor that would let third parties de-value the premium features with an open SDK.

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Err? Fwiw we put every feature we can in every device we can. There are often hardware limitations and of course we care about margins so there is hardware we could put on a cheaper band, but then it wouldn't be a cheaper band.

Once you get past hardware, almost all of our software feature decisions come down to battery life. The cheaper bands are smaller, and have smaller batteries, and compromising on battery life wouldn't serve our customers very well.

Speaking of "cheaper bands" I don't think you could get a much cheaper band than on the Charge HR.

As evinced by myself and many people in this thread alone, you'd better buy yourself some Gorilla Glue if you're buying a Charge HR, because the band is useless, to the point of being "not fit for purpose". Not that FitBit will accept a return, of course...

"We can give you 25% off a new FitBit!" hahaha. No. I'll lament my purchase, apply more glue to keep the band even slightly attached, until it finally gives up the ghost, and then I'll never buy another FitBit product again.

https://www.google.com/search?q=charge+hr+band+broken

I'm curious, because my friends routinely tell me stories about how easy our returns are. I had someone I had just met tell me that they accidentally drove their car over their device and we shipped them a new one, even after they told us that.

What are the circumstances for yours? Maybe with the Charge 2 out they're offering you 25% off that?

cough cough show current battery level on charge hr w/o plugging it in cough cough

Yeah, without revealing too much of our secret sauce (such as it is), that's not as simple as just turning on a feature that we've flagged off in that device. The devices that have that feature run a different OS.

My assumption is based on the differences between the Charge (non-HR) and the Alta I was given after 4 Charge replacements. The Alta does text alerts but doesn't do stair counting. Assuming the latter only needs an accelerometer there isn't anything obvious in the hardware that might other be missing to make it impossible.

The Alta is missing an altimeter.

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