FITBIT SENSE: AMBITIOUS TO A FAULT

FITNESS TRACKER

- MICHAEL SIMON

There are a lot of things the Fitbit Sense does that the Apple Watch can’t. Fitbit’s latest smartwatch can track your stress level and help you calm down. It records your nightly skin temperature to help predict if an illness is coming on. It lets you choose between Alexa and Google Assistant (or at least it will soon). And the battery lasts for days and days.

But while Fitbit has done an admirable job of building a smartwatch that’s truly different—and in some ways better than Apple’s latest wearables—the Sense ultimately tries too hard to be an Apple Watch alternative. Where Apple has slowly added features to its Watch in an effort to keep things simple, Fitbit’s quest to leapfrog over Apple has given the Sense too many things to do. Rather than embracing the simplicity of the Fitbit Versa and distilling the effortlessness of its sleep detection into a watch that adapts to the user, the Sense adds enough complexity to make the whole experience more frictional that it should be.

Fitbit doesn’t need to go back to the drawing board, but the Sense isn’t the next-generation smartwatch it needs, at least not yet.

A FAMILIAR, REFINED DESIGN