Fitbit launches $150 Charge 3 fitness tracker with new design

AppleInsider

The latest "swim proof" version of the fitness tracker is set to launch in October at a $149.95 price point

Fitbit Monday announced the Charge 3, the latest product in its Charge line of "swim proof" wrist-based fitness trackers. The new product, at $149.95, represents a cheaper competitor to the Apple Watch and other higher-end smartwatches and wearables, while offering less functionality.

Fitbit also offers the Versa smartwatch, a more direct Apple Watch competitor, which launched in March, as well as the higher-end Ionic.

The first Fitbit Charge arrived in 2014, with the Charge 2 debuting in 2016.

In its announcement of the product, Fitbit touts the Charge line as its highest-selling. The new version, it says, offers a touchscreen display and seven days of battery life, as well as "the most advanced health and fitness features found on a Fitbit tracker to date." It offers what it calls advanced sleep-tracking features, measuring heart rate variability much like how the Apple Watch does.

"With Charge 3, we are building on the success of our best-selling Charge franchise and delivering our most innovative tracker, offering an extremely slim, comfortable and premium design, along with the advanced health and fitness features our users want. Charge 3 gives existing users a compelling reason to upgrade, while also allowing us to reach new users who want a sleeker, more affordable wearable in a tracker form factor," James Park, co-founder and CEO of Fitbit, said as part of the announcement. "Our commitment to consumer choice and ability to meet the demand of millions of users by offering a range of products, from trackers to smartwatches, will enable us to expand our share of the overall wearables market."

The Charge 3, which is available for presale now ahead of its October release, starts at $149.95, with a Fitbit Pay-enabled edition going for $169.95.

As of the end of 2017, Apple for the first time led the worldwide wearables market, with 17.7 million Apple Watches shipped, compared with 15.4 million of all Fitbit devices in the calendar year 2017. That's according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Wearables Tracker.

matrix077

Is Fitbit compatible with Health now?

razorpit

Don't know about native support, I doubt it. But you can get SyncSolver from the iOS app store and that works pretty good, although admittedly I only use it with my FitBit scale.

radarthekat

Fitbit is a classic also-ran.  Whatever money has been invested over the years in that company would have been better invested elsewhere.  And there’s a long list of elsewhere’s I could come up with.  

AI_lias

Actually, this article is out of place here, since Apple does not compete in the fitness tracker market. The fitness trackers are getting pretty close to some smart watch features, but still, it's not the same thing.

Fitbit has a good niche to fill with Charge 3: fitness tracking for up to a week between charges for $150, which Apple cannot touch, because they chose to not address this, but went with the full smartwatch only. Some people (me included) do not want full smartwatch functionality, which is overkill, especially the hi res display, but favor longer battery life. For a fitness tracker, and at this price, this thing is pretty good, has some very compelling features.

claire1

People are buying these?...

I'm guessing this is the new "Apple Watch Killer" for the iKnockoff market? Otherwise I don't see this being successful in the iPhone user market. Especially if Series 4 is coming soon.

hari5

Fitbit Versa adopted lot of design asthetics & features from Apple Watch but these fitness trackers such as Charge comes nowhere close to Apple Watch as you might expect from a Health & Fitness point of view. 

Having used Charge 2 for a better part of year, I faced a major problem with their step calculations. It used to keep on counting steps even when I was driving a bike or I was in bus. Fitbit really need to correct their algorithm as lot of users reported the same problem.

And those were like thousands of steps which never happend and in order to get the correct step count we had to manually add an activity called 'Driving' at precise time duration on Fitbit website dashboard to negate those steps.

It's very tiresome experience for everyday basis. 

LordeHawk

It will be very interesting to see what Apple has up it’s sleeve with the next few generations of Apple watch.  Apple’s history of taking commodity tech (ie: sensors, optics, and chips) and propelling them to new heights, is well documented.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the Heart monitoring functions of the watch, were just to test the feasibility of optical technology in a mass-consumer wearable.  
Considering this proven lab tech:
“Lamego's work prior to being hired at Apple measured total hemoglobin, oxygen content, carboxyhemoglobin, methemoglobin, and much more in optical, non-invasive sensors. As designed, The "Rainbow Technology" platform uses more than seven wavelengths of light to acquire blood constituent data based on light absorption.”
https://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/14/apple-has-big-ambitions-in-expanding-vital-sign-monitoring-continuing-hiring-spree

Combined with other tech Apple has been waiting to mature; Micro LED, AI, and associated sensors.
I expect soon, Apple will not just be about hardware or software, but BioWare.

matrix077

razorpit said:

Don't know about native support, I doubt it. But you can get SyncSolver from the iOS app store and that works pretty good, although admittedly I only use it with my FitBit scale.

A shame. It’d be great to use this to track my sleep when my original Apple Watch dies. 

chasm

Without exception, every single friend I have who chose Fitbit has had to replace it between two and five times over the last three years. Meanwhile, my OG Watch just keeps on ... working.