Fitbit Surge: Active fitness or performance running, but can it do both?

The Fitbit Surge is the fitness wearables company’s flagship product. The company made its name focusing on the active fitness end of the market with wearables like the One, Flex, Charge and Blaze. These are to varying degrees, watches designed to get people more active.

They measure steps, calories and floors climbed and provide motivational messages on the watch, on your phone, and even via email. The fitbit app is fantastic and you can go into granular detail on food consumption, and sleep monitoring. They really are 24-hour life changers.

For people who are looking to lose weight or just want reminders about when to get up from their desk to go for a walk these are great. With the Surge however, Fitbit are moving into the ‘Professional Fitness’ sector. This is essentially people who run regularly, go to the gym or are regular participants in any other types of physical exercise.

By doing this they are moving into a very competitive market. The running watch sector is dominated by Garmin’s Forerunner series, the Apple watch and Tom Tom’s Runner watches which are established and trusted in the market.

I’m running the London Marathon in April, and have run several in the past and have used Garmins, and Tom Toms and loved them in different ways. My initial thoughts when it was suggested I try a Fitbit were that I was active already. I don’t need to count my step and get alerts to be active so what use would a fitbit be?

Features

Firstly, and it needs to be said, it’s not an attractive watch. I struggled to wear it all day at work, meeting friends and in the evening because essentially I’m vain. However if you want to use this as an activity tracker it’s a huge drawback. Basically it was used for running and little else. There are three watch straps sizes ranging from small (14-16cm), large (16-20cm), x-large (20-23cm), so there’s a fit for for most users.

The screen is a 1.26 inch monochrome affair which is fantastic for displaying data, but is a tad drab. With the current range of smartwatches on the market, it’s a touch underwhelming.

Along with the touchscreen, there’s also three buttons on the side of the watch. The one on the left launches the various activities. The two on the right are essentially your action buttons allowing you start, stop and end a workout. They can also work with the smartwatch and music playback modes.

On the underside of the watch is the optical heart rate monitor which uses PurePulse technology to measure changes in blood volume to detect and relay heart rate to the screen. It also has a accelerometer which is used for sleep tracking and estimating running on a treadmill.

Finally, the watch has a 5ATM water resistancy rating which is fine for showers, but not swimming. This is pretty disappointing as the watch would really benefit from swim tracking but we tried it in the shower and it was fine.

Performance

Firstly, the battery life. Fitbit claim seven days of wear but this seems to not take into account running. Running for two hours on a Friday and then an hour on both Saturday and Sunday and it was on it’s last legs.

If you are using it as a fitness tracker then seven days seems reasonable, but with any performance activity that will lessen. It could be worse and still compares well to TomTom but less so Garmin.

The software on the watch is accessed by a combination of button strikes and screen swipes. It’s well laid out and easy to use. The big bonus was the time it takes to access GPS satellites. Other watches and indeed bike computers can take an age, which can leave you getting cold having warmed up ready to track your run. The longest I had to wait with the Surge was 20 seconds.

Compared to other watches the data collection is roughly the same. It tends to be a bit more generous but that’s fine by me! The main issue which really prevents this being a watch to track marathon training with is the lack of on screen data, or rather it’s not customisable. I wanted my heart rate, my time run, average and current pace. Sadly that wasn’t possible.

Verdict

A cracking fitness tracker for those looking to move onto the occasional run but the lack on on screen data means I’ll stick with the Garmin for my marathon training.