You may remember that I have a Fitbit Force, and I have been threatening to post a review of the thing.  Here’s the short version: it has made me want a Pebble.  Which is disappointing, because I don’t really like the idea that I spent $130 so that I could figure out that I actually wanted to spend $150.

Here’s the longer version:  As a device for the very specific purpose that the Fitbit Force is created for, it works well enough.  It keeps track of how much I walk every day.  This is useful information– I’m a data nerd by nature, and I like the idea of keeping track of my activity.  It appears to keep a reasonably accurate count of my steps given that it’s attached to my wrist; I’ve driven places and noted that bumps or whatever have incremented the steps by a couple, but by and large hand/wrist/arm movements don’t appear to ever trigger it.  I’ve also walked around my house watching the display change, and it adds steps as I walk.  It’s not great about stairs– I live in a house without stairs (well, more or less, as I never enter the basement without good reason) and my school doesn’t have any either, so basically if it’s registered any stairs at all at the end of the day something’s gone wrong.  Right now, for example, it’s telling me I’ve climbed two flights of stairs today, and I’ve literally not climbed a single step.

I assume that the calorie counts work, although it took a minute to adjust to the idea that it’s literally trying to calculate every calorie that I burn– waking up in the morning and discovering that it thought I’d burned 400-some-odd calories while sleeping was sorta odd.

It also serves as a watch and a sleep tracker; I believe it tracks sleep just by noting how often it moves over the course of the night, and when I wake up in the morning I can check a little readout that tracks “asleep” vs. “restless.”  I basically have to assume that “restless” really means “awake,” though, because short of getting out of bed and walking around it’s not going to process anything I do as me being awake– up to and including actually checking the time, which seems rather impossible to do if I’m asleep.

And… well, that’s it.

The best thing about it?  I can set an alarm, and it vibrates on my wrist rather than making noise.  Given that I’m supposed to be wearing the thing to bed anyway, that’s awesome, and I really don’t ever want to be awakened by noise again.  I love love love the vibrating alarm.

I don’t love having to use my phone to set it (which isn’t really avoidable, as the thing’s user interface on the watch itself is limited to a single button) and I despise the fact that there’s no snooze option.  This is implementable with a single button, mind you– a tap snoozes, a long-tap silences, or vice versa.

The catch is annoying; while it doesn’t seem to be wearing or anything like that, it’s difficult to snap closed tightly and I regularly knock it off my wrist while brushing stuff off my chest (TMI:  I have a bit of a beard dandruff issue, okay?  I brush my chest off quite a bit.)

The app’s functionality is… lacking.  I can get a sleep report, data on calories/steps/miles (although I never told it a stride length) and a couple of other things for that day, or I can scroll back through other dates– in other words, I can get a day’s worth of data at a time, and there’s no option to look at the last week or month or anything like that.  I can get more data from the website, but that’s stupid; the thing is attached to my wrist and bluetoothed to my phone; why the hell can’t I get a week’s worth of data from the app?  Given how detailed the stats on website visits that I can get through the WordPress app are, you’d think that a device whose sole purpose is keeping track of biometric data would have more robust data reporting available through its app.

Sleep reporting is cool, but ultimately useless.  I had four moments of restlessness last night: great!  And six hours and 32 minutes of “sleep.”  Okay.  What do I do with that information?  No idea.

It supposedly interfaces nicely with MyFitnessPal and a few other things; I haven’t had any good reason to use that functionality yet because I got burned out on calorie-tracking the last time I lost a bunch of weight and it got really annoying.  I haven’t gotten back on that particular horse yet.

It displays the time, and has a nice, bright display.  It does not display the date.  It has room to display the date– or at least could add it as another screen that you reach with an additional button press.  This omission is annoying.  I have to push a button to get it to tell me the time, which is… well, also moderately annoying, but it saves battery life so I can live with it.

Basically?  I want a smartwatch.  I want notifications beamed to my wrist, and I want to be notified of things by a vibration, not a beep or a tone.  I want to be able to see those notifications without getting my phone out, and when I do get my phone out I want the data that I see to be useful to me.

I am aware that this is not what a Fitbit Force is actually for, for the most part, although supposedly there are some firmware updates coming that will let it do notifications if it’s paired with iOS.  Which mine will be.

So, yeah.  I bought a Fitbit to figure out that I wanted a Pebble.

Dammit.