However, like those devices, it’s not being used. The Charge 3 also packs a relative SpO2 sensor like the Versa and Ionic smartwatches do. Unless you bank with Santander or the handful of smaller banks which support this feature, it’s of no use to you (or, currently, me). The first is Fitbit Pay, available on the £150 special edition. There are two more major additions which fall under the headings “mostly useless” and “currently useless”.

Plus, it seems like it has a quick charge function, going from 4% to 30% in 15 minutes, but taking an hour to reach 90%. Not that connected GPS is a battery hog – my 40-minute bike commute knocked just 2% off the battery. Fitbit quotes seven days and I found the Charge 3 made that marker easily, stretching to nine days when I couldn’t use connected GPS and so got very light use out of it. With the standard calls, texts and calendar notifications expanded to include apps – in my experience Fitbit seemed to offer notifications from any apps I had allowed on my phone including Citymapper, email and WhatsApp. Now, the Charge 3 connects swiftly when you start an exercise on the device and you have an active connection with the Fitbit app.Ī swathe of other improvements are confined to the look and feel of the device, with an inset button and a larger touchscreen (the earlier version used the button and banging the bottom of the device to navigate). For the first week or so the device would just not connect to my phone, but I assume an update was applied when I reloaded the Charge 3 on to my Fitbit account after swapping it out for the Ionic while I ran a 10K race.

The Charge 3, released in autumn this year, keeps all of those positives and brings more to the table in a more polished package, but the Charge 2 dropped to £80 in the Black Friday sales and appears to have stayed there, which raises the question: are the Charge 3’s upgrades worth the extra £50? That will depend on you, but with the gift-giving season bearing down on us this early hands-on review should help you make up your mind while we keep testing it – and decide whether it deserves a place in our best fitness trackers.īefore I detail the new features and my experience of them, it’s worth me reassuring you that the problems with the connected GPS people on Fitbit forums have experienced (as I did, but not other reviewers strangely) seem to have been resolved.

Fitbit charge 3