One month with Fitbit Ionic

I received the Fitbit Ionic as present from my wife, 4 weeks ago.
After a month of using it, here are my thoughts on the experience of owning one.

I must start with the fact that I am not doing any particular sport. I am not in the target profile of users that mostly benefits from having such a device. I use it only as a smart watch, with the health benefits the Ionic brings.

So, let me bring on the positive and negative things that Ionic has, in the exact order that comes to my mind.

• Battery life is phenomenal, 6 DAYS and a half in between recharges. For me, this is a big plus - as I like to monitor my sleep. So I have to wear it, day and night to have a reliable and consistent benchmark. So no way I can do this if I would have to charge the device during the night.

• Software interface is slow and/or not very intuitive. People still ask me to demo it to them and I sill struggle sometimes to find how to do something. Sometimes you have to swipe left, sometimes up and down, sometimes to push one of the 3 physical buttons, or a virtual one. The feel is that this is very fragmented, different teams developed different interfaces.

• Sensors and measurements seems very accurate. I didn't do a scientific tests, but it seems quite in line with all my daily activities - regardless if it was walking, running, or climbing stairs. I am learning a lot about myself with this. Seems that coffee has some effects on my heart rate, and so, I started to reduce the amounts of coffee intake.

• It's an uphill battle to have data stored in the iPhone Heath app sync with the Fitbit's app. I see that they are competitors, but I see value for myself to have my historical data at least imported in the Fitbit.

• Styling is great! It matches both my casual and smart casual type of dressing. So, I can wear it even at the office, not only in my spare time.

• Fitbit's system does a lot to motivate me. I added 3-4 friends, and the friendly challenges are motivating me. I definitely do more steps now and climb more stairs daily, than a month ago. And this is with the weather getting so much worse, as now we have snow outside - so it's really counterintuitive not to use the car.

So, conclusions time!

All, in all, if software would be a bit more polished I would say it's a great pice of tech to own! I am looking forware to keep it for at least 1 year. Hopefully, the next software upgrades will take this gem to the next level.