Fitbit Versa 3 Review - Thurrott.com - Thurrott.com

Two weeks ago, I finally switched from a Fitbit Charge 3 tracker to a Fitbit Versa 3 smartwatch.

That this is the right fitness wearable for me is certain: The Versa 3 carries forward several years of Fitbit health and fitness data and offers a superior display and several new features when compared to my previous wearable.

I use a wearable for three basic and interrelated tasks: Exercise/activity tracking, heart rate tracking, and sleep tracking.

Some of this is automated: Fitbit and other wearables can automatically sense certain activities, like walking and sleeping, while other activities require the user to manually start and stop the tracking.

But when I use an elliptical trainer for cardio or lift weights, I have to initiate and end tracking interactively with the device.

(As an aside, my wife uses a previous generation Versa 2 to track her runs and bike rides, both manually, in addition to walk and sleep tracking, so I have a bit of information about that as well.).

As I wrote earlier, I eventually chose the Fitbit Versa 3 over its slightly more capable new sibling, the Sense 3, and over the Apple Watch.

The problems with the Apple Watch are obvious, but the biggest issue to me, aside from the Apple ecosystem lock-in, is the battery life: I sleep poorly, and sleep tracking is important to me, and the Apple Watch’s laughably bad battery life makes these devices a non-starter for me.

6 days a week, I visit the gym, where I am currently at about 25 minutes of cardio on the elliptical and anywhere from 22 to 35 minutes of weightlifting on machines depending on the day.

There are two things related to each exercise: Active zone minutes and heart rate rating monitoring, each of which are automatic.

Active zone minutes is new to me, as this wasn’t tracked by my Fitbit Charge 3.

As far as accuracy goes, I’ve been able to compare the Fitbit’s real-time heart rate monitoring functionality against the Amazon Halo Band and the hand contacts on the elliptical, and I’ve compared notes with my wife.

We describe our results a bit differently, but I think we’re experiencing the same thing: She believes that Fitbit devices “lag behind” when it comes to heart rate monitoring, but I think it’s fairer to say that they start off inaccurate and then get more accurate over time.

What I mean by that is that the wearable often registers a lower heart rate in the beginning of a session but that it matches (often identically) what the elliptical trainer and Halo Band report in the latter two-thirds of the exercise.

I’m generally OK with this, but it does impact my active zone minutes score, which I don’t like.

I also find that Fitbit’s measurement of active zone minutes is off, regardless of the heart rate measurement.

I basically do the same activities each day, but I’ve seen my active zone minutes vary from 24 to 53 over the past seven days, and I don’t quite get that.

And of course I don’t get many active zone minutes from weightlifting, just from cardio.

My 30 minutes of weightlifting this morning was described as “moderate activity,” with 2 cardio zone minutes and 2 fat burn zone minutes, but my elliptical work garnered 21 of 25 minutes in the zone.

I sleep poorly, and have for many years, and I kind of obsess over this particular metric.

My wife, who is much healthier than I am, and has a lower average heart rate, has less successful results: When we watch TV at night, her Versa 2 records some of that time as (poor) sleep, so she has unusually long sleep times as tracked by the app, with correspondingly unusually poor sleep scores.