Fitbit Versa review: Slowly but surely pushing Fitbit past the “fit” bit

If you think Fitbit is just for fitness, this $200 smartwatch might change your mind.

Every company hopes to make a device that appeals to the masses. But when you're a company like Fitbit, known for its fitness expertise, it can be harder to clear the mental hurdle in consumers' heads that separates what you're known for and what you want to be. People who prioritize wearable features that aren't fitness-related may not even look to Fitbit when considering a new device, because fitness is so deeply ingrained into the company's identity.

Fitbit's core will always be health and fitness, but the company is actively trying to make devices that appeal to people who don't necessarily place their exercise and dieting regime on a pedestal. The new $200 Versa smartwatch speaks to those users as a wearable designed for "mass appeal." With its combination of Fitbit-developed fitness features and Pebble-influenced smartwatch capabilities, the Versa aims to bring more users into the Fitbit ecosystem with the promise that it can add value and convenience to all parts of your life.

Design
It's not shocking that the Versa stands tall as Fitbit's most polished smartwatch to date. The company learned a lot since coming out with its two previous smartwatches (the Blaze and the Ionic) and since purchasing Pebble at the end of 2016. Pebble loyalists will immediately recognize the Versa's design as a Pebble derivative; it closely resembles the Pebble Time Steel.

The Versa has the same rounded-square case shape as the Time Steel had, and it is made of a satin-finish aluminum that looks more fashion-forward (and some may say, female-friendly) than the Time Steel's aura. On the slim edges of the Versa lie three buttons that navigate back on the display and provide quick access to the workout and alarm apps.

Fitbit appears to have needed the help from Pebble to right the wrongs of its Blaze smartwatch, which debuted in 2016. Not only is the Versa a more attractive smartwatch than the Blaze, but it also doesn't have the Blaze's weird metal harness that surrounds its module. Even the Versa's charging dock—which requires you to pinch its sides to open up the plastic throne enough to fit the Versa's case in—is a more elegant charging solution than the cage-like monstrosity that the Blaze needed to charge.

Dominating the case is the 0.94-inch, full-color LCD touchscreen that, along with the side buttons, is used to navigate the watch's apps, programs, and settings. The screen isn't always-on, but you can program the backlight to stay on for up to 20 seconds before the display goes dark. A forceful tap on the screen, a flick of the wrist, or a press of the left-side button wakes it back up again. Some Pebble loyalists may scoff at the lack of an always-on display, but Fitbit likely chose this type of display not only because most other smartwatches have the same but also because it preserves battery life.

The interchangeable, 20mm bands sit on the top and bottom edges of the Versa, secured by quick-release pins that are similar to other smartwatch bands. You don't need to remove the bands to charge the Versa, which is fantastic because the bands are quite difficult to get back on after removing them. You must hold the pin back while both removing and replacing the bands, making it difficult to do while holding the Versa's tiny case at the same time. While the Versa isn't compatible with any 20mm band, Fitbit has a wide array of silicone, leather, mesh, and other types of bands you can invest in.

You'll want to get a few silicone-based classic bands if you're a swimmer since the Versa's design tracks swimming and is water-resistant up to 50 meters. Other hardware perks include Fitbit's standard optical heart-rate monitor, a tri-axis accelerometer and gyroscope, an altimeter, and storage for about 300 songs. While the Versa doesn't have an onboard GPS, it does have Fitbit's connected GPS feature.

Only special edition, $229 Versa models will have NFC for Fitbit Pay, making users essentially choose if they want to have the option to use contactless payment systems with the Versa. Fitness enthusiasts will find music storage more useful than other users. NFC is arguably a feature more often included on all-purpose smartwatches, since all the big players have their own payment systems (Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, etc.). I wish the Versa had both on every model; that way, one user could pay for a coffee on the way home from a run while another could use it to pay for a birthday gift for their significant other.

As far as battery life goes, Fitbit promises the Versa will last more than four days on a single charge. After two and a half days of all-day and all-night use, my Versa was down to 56 percent. At that pace, it should fall in line with Fitbit's estimate, easily making it past the four-day mark before needing to be charged. That's great for a modern smartwatch, considering the Apple Watch Series 3 lasts about two days on a single charge, while many Android Wear devices demand charging every night.

The hashtag "FitbitForAll" came on my Versa's packaging, and I understand why Fitbit is positioning this as a smartwatch that anyone can wear. It's thinner and lighter than any of the company's existing wearables, and it's more appealing to wear all day long with its various finishes and band options. Fitbit explained that last year's Ionic was meant for fitness buffs who wanted a device that combined the best fitness features with crucial smartwatch features. The Versa is meant to attract more users, including those who aren't training for marathons or Iron Man competitions.

Fitness features
Today dashboard
The Versa doesn't introduce any new fitness features to the Fitbit system. Instead, it includes (what Fitbit believes to be) the most appealing features for a majority of users from the company's existing library. The Versa tracks daily movement, including steps, distance, calories, floors climbed, and active minutes, along with recorded workouts, sleep, and all-day heart rate. All of those data points (except sleep) come together in the redesigned "Today" dashboard, accessible by swiping up from the watch face on the Versa's display. More so than similar screens on the Fitbit Ionic, the new Today dashboard puts the most important information in one place that's easy for users to get to with one swipe.

Optional on the Today dashboard are device tips and tricks and inspiration, either of which can be turned off by going into the dashboard settings on the watch. I kept both on during my time testing the Versa, and the tips and ticks cards will certainly come in handy for those who are brand-new Fitbit users (as well as those who aren't yet comfortable with Fitbit OS). You won't find much personalized information on the inspiration cards, most of which push general sentiments like "Hydration makes the body happy."

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Activity tracking
Tracking exercise works the same on the Versa as it did on the Ionic—your favorite workout profiles live in the Activity app on the watch that you can access either by swiping to the left from the watch face or pressing the top-right button. Only seven workout profiles can live on the watch at one time, but you can edit those in the Fitbit mobile app to keep your favorites on hand all the time. Those who need more on-device workout profiles would be better served by a device like the Garmin Vivoactive 3.

Each profile has a full-color photo of a person completing that exercise, which is a colorful way for Fitbit to make use of the vivid display on the Versa. Each profile is in quick-start mode from the beginning, kind of like an Apple Watch's workout profiles are: tap on the one you want and then tap start to begin. A gear icon at the top-left corner of the intro photos lets you change workout-specific settings, like automatic lap recognition—which keeps its stats glanceable on the screen during a workout—and always-on display preferences.

Some workout profiles, including walk and run, have a connected GPS option in their settings. Available on mid-tier Fitbit devices, connected GPS lets you map an outdoor exercise route when you're using the Versa with your smartphone nearby. Since the device doesn't have an onboard GPS chip, it needs your smartphone's GPS to create a map and marry its data with the location data captured by your mobile device. Connected GPS is on by default for most outdoor activities, but you can turn it off at any time.

The Versa uses its continuous heart-rate monitor to capture pulse measurements throughout all recorded workouts and all moments that surround them. The default watch face on the Versa—a cool, modern digital face called Layers—shows your current heart rate at all times. Staring at the watch face long enough will show you the changes in your pulse in real-time. During rest and moderate exercise, the heart-rate monitor accurately measured my pulse in step with the Polar H10 chest strap. However, it was slow to reach high BPMs in the 170s and 180s during peak exercise periods.

Heart rate captured during sleep informs the awake, light sleep, and deep sleep time estimates in the Fitbit app. The company has continuously improved its sleep tracking methods for a while, and they remain one of the best parts about using any Fitbit device with a heart-rate monitor. Not only can the Versa use its heart-rate monitor to more accurately estimate sleep stages, but it also captures your resting heart rate, a key health indicator that shows how hard your heart must work in its most restful state. Resting heart rate appears below your current heart rate in the Today dashboard as well, so you can always quickly refer back to that piece of data.

Like most of Fitbit's recently debuted devices, the Versa has Smart Track and guided breathing exercises. The former will capture workouts that are longer than 10 minutes that you forget to record yourself, while the latter help you calm down with visual and tactile guided breathing sessions. I appreciate the vibration feedback with the guided breathing exercises because it lets me close my eyes and still know when to inhale and exhale.

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Female health
I wish I could have tested Fitbit's new female health tracking feature, but it's not coming out until later this year. The new feature lets those who identify as female track menstrual cycles and symptoms that come along with them, including headaches, cramps, mood changes, and more. As a loyal Clue user (which has a Fitbit OS app—we'll talk about that later), I'd love to track my cycle information with the same program that I use to track my daily activity. Cycle information goes hand in hand with activity information—they both influence each other, so having all of that information in one place can help female users understand their bodies better.

Fitbit Coach
A bunch of guided workouts and health plans live within Fitbit Coach, the company's subscription health app that's a rebranding of FitStar. On the Versa, a couple of preloaded Coach workouts let you give the service a try before subscribing for $39.99 per year. Fitbit provided me with a trial of Fitbit Coach to get a glimpse into the other kinds of workouts offered through the program.

As you use the Versa, Coach sends personalized and recommended workouts to your wrist. All the on-wearable workouts guide you through various moves, including planks, jumping jacks, bench dips, knee taps, and more for the allotted number of reps or designated amount of time before ushering you to the next move in the circuit. You're supposed to complete these workouts free from your smartphone, using just the Versa's display to know which moves to do and when to move on. Full-color images of people doing each move show you how to complete most exercises, making it easy for those who may not know what boxer bounces are.

Then there are more activities that live within the Coach mobile app separated into categories including outdoor walks and stair and treadmill workouts. These have you following along on your smartphone, so you can see how each interval is supposed to be performed. Bodyweight workouts even have short videos showing how to complete each move, similar to the .gif-like figures that live in the on-watch workouts.

As someone who works out regularly, the variety offered through Fitbit Coach excites me. I try to change up my workouts often, but that habit can sometimes fall through the cracks. A program like Fitbit Coach takes the thought process out of deciding how I want my cardio workout to go on any given day. I'd still like to have a few more free Coach workouts available on the Versa before subscribing, but Fitbit Coach is certainly a program that those who are serious about getting in shape should consider.

I discovered an exciting idiosyncrasy about Fitbit Coach as well: it can connect to Apple Health. According to Fitbit, the company kept that integration option when transitioning the program to Fitbit Coach from its previous FitStar branding. However, the main Fitbit mobile app still does not integrate with Apple Health or Google Fit.

Smartwatch features
Watch faces and apps
Like all Fitbit devices, the Versa works on Android, iOS, and Windows devices. Like the Ionic, it runs Fitbit OS, the company's wearable operating system that isn't even a year old yet. Fitbit OS on the Versa is nearly identical to that on the Ionic, but it has grown a bit since its inception. Fitbit claims there are now more than 550 apps and watch faces available for Fitbit OS devices, proving that Fitbit Studio has attracted a fair amount of developers. Fitbit Studio is the company's toolbox that lets anyone dabble in making their own Fitbit OS watch faces and apps—it's all accessible through the Web, and, other than a Fitbit OS device, there are no extra startup costs to developing for the platform.

Before we dive into watch faces and apps, let's talk about the Versa as a smartwatch. With a nearly identical UI to the Ionic, it's quite easy to navigate. The watch face is the homepage where you can swipe down to look at alerts and swipe up to view the Today dashboard. Swiping to the side brings up all of your installed apps, four on each screen, and a long-tap of an app's icon lets you move it to a different location. Fitbit programmed standard apps into the device by default, which include alarms, timer, music, and others. While the look and feel of Fitbit OS remains similar to what I experienced on the Ionic, Fitbit definitely improved the performance of the OS—it's faster, less glitchy, and smoother overall.

Smartphone alerts remain of the same quality as they were on the Ionic—simple messages with the sender listed in larger font at the top of the alert. Tapping on the window expands the message so you can read more of it (I couldn't read full emails on the Versa, but I read most of my text messages). Tapping also lets you see the app from which the message came and when it was received. In the Fitbit mobile app, you can choose which apps you want to have access your wrist. Those that have sent alerts to your smartphone appear in the Notifications page under the Versa's settings, and you can toggle any of them on or off.

Android users will be able to respond to text messages with canned replies later this year, but iOS users won't get that luxury thanks to Apple's closed ecosystem. Garmin treats message replies on its wearables in the same way, so this isn't a discrepancy unique to Fitbit. Nevertheless, it's a hindrance that wearables made by third-party companies have. Devices like the Apple Watch entice so many users because they're already locked into the parent company's ecosystem—Apple's wearable works ideally with all of Apple's native programs, and even Android Wear devices work best when paired to an Android smartphone.

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Both third-party watch faces and apps live in the Fitbit mobile app: the Versa's device settings have dedicated icons for both, and within each lie the options to see your current watch face and all installed apps as well as all watch faces and programs available to download. This is a fine setup for apps, but it's irritating for watch faces. Fitbit still only allows one watch face installed on its smartwatches at once, meaning your current watch face is the only watch face you have until you download a new one from the mobile app. You can't save multiple watch faces to the Versa and switch between them on a whim, which continues to baffle me since most other smartwatches let you have that creative, personal freedom.

But there are more watch faces to choose from now than there were last year, which is an improvement nonetheless. Fitbit created the most polished ones of the bunch (my favorites are Layers and Flare), and the others are reminiscent of past Pebble watch faces. Many are jumbled while others are incredibly minimalist, and the majority of them incorporate some kind of activity information (like step count) into the square frame.

Fitbit's app gallery has grown substantially as well, populated with programs made by both small and large developers. Clue, my cycle tracker of choice, has its own Fitbit OS app that lets you see a primitive cycle diagram on the watch along with the number of days left before your next period, PMS stage, and fertile window. It also lets you log daily cycle symptoms, such as headaches, bleeding, and energy levels, directly from the watch. All of this is possible after you connect your Clue account with Fitbit, which you can do by logging in within the Versa app settings. Not all Fitbit users are Clue users, of course, but I'm happy that one of the most popular cycle-tracking apps integrates with Fitbit and its smartwatches.

But not all Fitbit apps require a simple login with an app you already have on your smartphone. The Philips Hue app, which lets you control smart lights from your wrist, requires you to input your bridge IP address before you can use the smartwatch app on the Versa. I tried to do this a few times, and it never successfully connected to my Hue ecosystem.

Third-party developers made plenty of obvious-yet-useful wearables apps, too. Take Tomatina, for example: it's a cute pomodoro timer that fits into Fitbit OS so well that I'm shocked the company didn't make the app itself. In the app's settings within the Fitbit mobile app, you can change the amount of time you want each period of work and rest to be. After syncing, the app will have your new preferences and will implement them the next time you start a session. It uses Fitbit OS' timer UI, which slowly fills up the black screen with color as the timer progresses, making it a bold app that's perfect for smartwatch use.

Unsurprisingly, Fitbit continues to have some bugs and issues infiltrating its newest features, and most of the ones I encountered regarded the Fitbit mobile app. Watch face and app pages crawled to load, the process to download new watch faces and apps is even slower, and editing individual app preferences isn't the smoothest experience.

Onboard music

Fitbit Connect, the company's desktop program, transfers music from your PC to the Versa. The music transfer function gave me some problems when I reviewed the Ionic, and I had a slight problem this time around as well. At first, Fitbit Connect wasn't recognizing my Versa even though it was near my PC and plugged in to the PC via its charging cable. It was also confusing my Versa for an Ionic—peculiar, but somewhat understandable since the Ionic was the only Fitbit device to have music storage until just a few weeks ago.

After troubleshooting with Fitbit, I learned that a bug sometimes causes Fitbit Connect to label a Versa as an Ionic. That's a relatively minor issue that should be fixed before the Versa is widely available. I also found out that I had forgotten an important step in syncing music to a Fitbit device in my first attempts: going to the Music icon on the Versa and tapping the "transfer music" button. Fitbit Connect won't discover a nearby Fitbit OS device until that "transfer music" button is tapped. But after doing that, the music section in Fitbit Connect filled up with recognizable playlists from my iTunes account.

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The Versa has enough space to hold 300 songs, but it only tracks with these file types: MP4 files (with AAC audio) and MP3s work on Mac and Windows, while AIFF files work only on Macs, and WMA work only on Windows. Since I use a Mac, Fitbit Connect is programmed to only discover playlists in my default music program (iTunes). That's designed to make it easier for users to select specific playlists to load onto the device, rather than sorting through hundreds or thousands of individual tracks.

Compared to Garmin Express' ability to transfer music to a wearable, Fitbit Connect moves like a turtle. It took me three to four minutes to transfer 10 songs to the Versa, whereas the same playlists appeared on my Garmin Forerunner 645 Music within seconds. Fitbit Connect's slowness may be due to Wi-Fi connectivity: music transfer happens wirelessly, while Garmin's transfer process requires your device to be connected via a cable to your computer (as most features in Garmin Express do).

After transferring, listening to music on the Versa was easy. I connected my Jabra Sport Pulse wireless earbuds to the device in seconds and chose which track I wanted to listen to from the Music app on the Versa. The Music app also controls the audio playing from your connected smartphone, so you can pause, skip, and adjust the volume of content playing in apps including Spotify, Audible, and Overcast. Just pick your mobile device as the source of the audio in the Music app's settings to control playback wirelessly. One quirk, though: only with Spotify was I able to pause playback and then start it again from the Versa. For some reason, the Music app only let me pause in Audible and Overcast.

Third time’s a charm
After two attempts with the Blaze and the Ionic, Fitbit finally made a successful, promising smartwatch. The Versa is what the Blaze should have been from the beginning, but I don't believe Fitbit could have made the Versa if it hadn't developed the Blaze and the Ionic first. Part of that process included a crucial trial-and-error period, but it also included the introduction of Pebble to the Fitbit family. The Versa has the most Pebble attributes of any of Fitbit's wearables, and that's a good thing. Not only will it be more successful at beckoning Pebble diehards to a new life, but its general smartwatch capabilities will persuade those who want a solid smartwatch to wear every day, regardless of their exercise routine.

Fitbit got the hardware right with the Versa, as it strikes a happy medium between smartwatch and fitness watch. Fitbit OS' developments since its inception are also promising, and Fitbit needs to invest even more resources into its wearable operating system if it wants to compete with the Android Wear, Tizen, and watchOS. The company already has a leg-up on most of the competition because its OS works fully with Android, iOS, and Windows mobile devices—only Tizen can even come close to competing with that.

Past success should tell Fitbit that ecosystem is everything. The company's mobile app is the best health and fitness program for any wearable because it has the flexibility to suit both serious athletes and novices alike. It didn't become that successful overnight, and neither will Fitbit OS. However, Fitbit has the opportunity to make its wearable operating system just as killer as its mobile application and overall ecosystem—if it can do that, its devices will be strong contenders in the smartwatch world. It may not have made a splash as Fitbit's first smartwatch, but if any device can entice users to take a chance on Fitbit as their smartwatch provider, it's the $200 Versa.

The Good
Lightweight design that's water-resistant up to 50 meters.
Bold, full-color touchscreen.
Good battery life.
New Today dashboard makes finding important daily activity info easy.
Great sleep tracking.
Accessible developer tools with Fitbit Studio.
Fitbit OS is growing, albeit slowly.
Fitbit mobile app remains the best fitness wearable companion program.
The Bad
Interchangeable bands are hard to remove and replace on the device.
NFC for Fitbit Pay only on special models.
Female health tracking and Android message replies not available until later this year.
Only one watch face can be saved on-device at one time.
Music transfer can be tricky if you don't follow the proper steps exactly.
The Ugly
Fitbit app doesn't integrate with Apple Health or Google Fit.