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Comment by puranjay | Hacker News Reader

I can't even understand how they're able to charge as much as they do. I've owned 3 Fitbit devices and they perform uniformly worse than a cheap as dirt Xiaomi Mi Band I received as a free prize. Their battery life tops out at 2 days max and the sync feature is broken. Heck, they don't even look good

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My wife's and my Fitbit Charge 2 can still get a good going of 5 days with a 3-4x hour-long exercise recording. My main issue with Fitbit is it treats us like someone who bought it for fashion. Also I prefer strength training, and to measure effort of anything but jogging and steps is out of scope for Fitbit. When I bought our Fitbit, I hoped the insights I can get out from the devices would improve over the years, because their slogan that time was about to revolutionise fitness with data. Unfortunately the usefulness of their products remain very basic.

> I've owned 3 Fitbit devices

There's your answer right there. If people keep buying then why would they charge less?

Because the name has a ring to it and brand lock-in is very powerful?

I didn't buy a single one. I was gifted all three by different people. And they likely bought it because it has the highest brand recall of all fitness trackers outside of Apple.

Bought my chinese no-name (it probably does have a name if I saved the box, but there's no brand on the device itself) for $10. Time, stepcount, calories, distance, heart rate, BP, O2 sat, sports functions, sleep, etc. The watch does lose about 45 seconds a day, so I have to sync it once a week or so to keep the time display in an acceptable range. The app is otherwise irrelevant to me. Charge lasts about 6 days.

I frankly wouldn't trust the numbers of any device that can't keep the time. Have you tried to verify them somehow?

Step counts as well as the fitbit. Heart rate is simple. How can it mess that up? Blood pressure is relative. You don't expect it to be accurate without a cuff. Same with O2. Those can show whether you're higher or lower "now" than you were an hour ago, a day ago, but they're not intended to be accurate on an absolute scale. Sleep seems to match up pretty well with snorelabs.

Now that I think about it, I wonder how well any of them keep time without syncing to their app.

>Heart rate is simple. How can it mess that up?

You might be surprised: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/23/study-shows-fitbit-trackers-...

That story is about Fitbit, which I don't have.

I check my pulse against a stopwatch during the same minute that Chinese no-name is counting my pulse, and the result is the same.

I mean, I'm not expecting them to pay a full $1 to get an RTC that keeps time up to 1s/month, but still, 45s/day is a lot, and it implies they really cheapened out on either design or components. I would mistrust even the relative measurements.

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