OUR VERDICT
The first ever smartwatch from Fitbit is a fitness watch at its heart. If you’re looking for some wristwear to use while exercising the Fitbit Ionic may suit you, just don’t expect a similar experience to other smartwatches out there.
FOR
- Fitbit Pay works well
- Great fitness features
- Solid battery life
AGAINST
- Controversial design
- Little bit slow
- Limited music offering
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Fitbit has become synonymous with fitness trackers, but now the company has decided to expand into a whole new market. Long rumored, we finally have the first Fitbit smartwatch, and it’s called the Ionic.
Offering similar features to expensive alternatives such as the Apple Watch and Android Wear, the Fitbit Ionic is a serious contender to be the smartwatch you choose to wear when you’re out running or hitting the gym.
However, there's now the additional competition of the new Apple Watch 3, which includes the same LTE connectivity feature as the Fitbit Ionic, not to mention the incursion of Garmin into the fitness smartwatch space with the Forerunner 645.
Fitbit Ionic price and release date
- The Fitbit Ionic costs £299.95 / $299.95 / AU$449.95
- It's an expensive option for a fitness watch
- Out now around the world
The Fitbit Ionic is the most expensive wearable yet from Fitbit. At £299.95 / $299.95 / AU$449.95 it costs more than the Fitbit Surge running watch, but a bit less than the Apple Watch 3 or LG Watch Sport.
We've seen the price drop a little, but not by anything significant - the most we've seen it discounted is around the £290/$290 mark and that means you probably shouldn't expect any huge discounts anytime soon
Design and display
- Aluminium build and lighter than most smartwatches
- Either plastic or leather bands that are easy to swap out
The Fitbit Ionic is a comfortable fit on your wrist, and compared to a lot of modern smartwatches is particularly light – so much so that you'll instantly notice how lightweight this feels on your wrist, which makes it a more pleasant to wear while working out than, say, the LG Watch Sport.
It’s a good fit for everyday use too, being comfortable to wear at a keyboard, which should encourage you to wear it all day to ensure the most accurate readings possible.
It’s waterproof, so you can take this in the shower or even go swimming with it – more on that in the fitness section.
The body of the watch is made of aluminum and features very small antenna bands on the sides, but it’s attractive and is easily the best-looking Fitbit product so far. That said, we found the design to be rather divisive, with friends and family either loving the look or hating it.
You may well love the look of the Fitbit Ionic, but if you’re bothered about what others think just bear in mind that it’s not likely to have the universal appeal of, say, the Apple Watch.
There’s one hardware button on the left-hand side with another two on the right that sit in similar positions to those on the Fitbit Blaze and enable you to move around the watch’s UI.
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Each is slightly raised too – Fitbit presumably thinks this will help you find them more easily when you’re fumbling around for the buttons while sweating and gasping for breath when pushing yourself.
We found the buttons worked for making the UI simple, plus it’s a touchscreen, so you can cycle through the apps by swiping.
There are leather and plastic strap options available with secure fasteners on each so the Ionic won't fall off when you're out for a jog.
We used both, and the plastic option is comfortable for when you’re sweating in the gym, while the leather strap is a much more attractive look – so you might want to get both if you want to wear this watch both for working out and dining out.
The display on the Ionic is a full-color screen that’s rectangular, unlike the more square Apple Watch or most Android Wear watches, but it is reminiscent of the Blaze’s screen. This one is quite a bit bigger though, and that’s down to the bezels being thinner.
That said, the bezels are relatively thick on the Fitbit Ionic. It’s one of our major criticisms of the design, and we think there’s a lot of wasted space below and above the screen. Fitbit could have included a much larger and more useful display instead.
Also, the Fitbit logo is annoyingly placed just below the screen, taking up quite a bit of room on the wearable.
The resolution of the LCD screen is 384 x 250, and we particularly like how bright it is – it reaches 1000 nits, which is the same as the Apple Watch 2 and means you can view it even in bright sunlight when out on a run.
We found the touchscreen to be a little slow to respond sometimes, and we often had to move our wrist fairly violently for the raise-to-wake feature to work. That’s particularly annoying when you’re working out and you need a clear look at your stats fast.
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