Is Fitbit Versa 2 FB507BKBK, the best Smartwatch in the Market?

By SleekMart

The Good The Fitbit Versa 2 battery lasts for days and days. There’s a clear, easy-to-understand breakdown of your fitness and sleep metrics in the Fitbit app. You get a wide selection of watch faces. It’s faster and more responsive than the first watch. The Fitbit versa 2 works on iOS or Android.

The Bad Alexa integration is not as fleshed out as it could be. Connected GPS means you have to take your phone with you when doing outdoor workouts.

The Bottom Line The Fitbit versa 2 is a great hybrid of a fitness tracker and a smartwatch. It’s still one of the best wearables you can buy for under ₹20,000.

It’s been a long week of work (and workouts) but the Fitbit Versa 2 FB507BKBK (under ₹20,000 at Amazon) hasn’t missed a beat, thanks to a battery that lasts and lasts. After almost a month wearing the Fitbit versa 2, we can safely say this is Fitbit’s best watch yet. It has a bright AMOLED screen and great fitness tracking features, and Alexa now lives on your wrist.

We praised the original Fitbit Versa because it was the best fusion of fitness tracker and smartwatch you could buy for less than ₹20,000. A year and a half later, there’s far more competition: Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Active 2 , Garmin’s watches come with GPS and many health features, plus the Apple Watch Series 5

Design: Great

The Apple Watch is slick and beautifully machined, if a little too shiny and squircle-ish. The Fitbit Versa 2 does its best to emulate that, but it’s also just fine for everyday use. Wearing a Fitbit Versa 2 next to the Apple Watch Series 5, one could almost be mistaken for the other from a casual distance.

The Versa 2 feels comfortable. The at-a-glance fitness watch faces often pack enough stats to be helpful too. But swapping faces requires loading them up from the phone app.
A speedier processor means scrolling apps and swiping down for notifications, or up for a daily fitness stat rundown, is smoother. It’s not as smooth as we’d like, but it’s better than it used to be. A new pull-down-based way to access quick settings makes it faster to silence notifications or pull up music remote controls.

One significant improvement over the first generation is the color AMOLED display. Text is legible and it’s bright enough in outdoor situations. Although the always-on display could be a touch brighter when in workout mode.

Fitness tracking is of finest quality

We used the Versa 2 for several workouts: runs, bike rides, Pilates and a spin class. It’s always been comfortable to wear regardless of the activity. Compared to the first Versa , which had three physical buttons, it’s now easier to start and stop workouts with the single button and touch screen combination on the Versa 2.

But apart from that small tweak to the physical design of the watch, there’s not much else that’s changed when it comes to workout tracking between the original Versa and Versa 2. The Coach app is still available to give you workouts on your wrist. Although you do have to install it on the watch from the Fitbit app.

For your own workouts, the 15 goal-based exercises let you set a desired target, like calories or distance, and you get an alert on the watch once you hit them. But there aren’t pace alerts (like the Apple Watch offers) that notify you if you are faster or slower than your desired pace. You can, however, see your pace on the screen during a run.
You can also customize the workout screen to have the metrics you want to see displayed front and center. The heart rate reading shows you what heart rate zone you’re in, such as cardio or fat burn.

Heart-rate tracking during all our workouts has been fairly consistent with readings from other fitness trackers we have used previously, although we haven’t yet tested the Fitbit versa 2 FB507BKBK with a chest-strap to compare results.

We would have liked an even brighter setting for the always-on display during workouts, which would help a lot with visibility in direct sunlight.
There’s no built-in GPS, so you have to take your phone with you to track distance and route information. For that, you’ll need to look to the Fitbit Ionic.
But Fitbit’s big strength over any other watch or fitness tracker has always been the Fitbit app: it gives you a clear, easy-to-understand breakdown of your exercise metrics and it’s a lot more simple to interpret than competitors like Samsung’s Health app or even the Apple Watch through the Activity/Health apps. It’s also a lot more social.

Health

On top of workouts, the Fitbit app also offers female health tracking. After having used it for a few months, it seems fairly accurate if you have a regular cycle. But to log your cycle or see additional details, you’ll need to pull out your phone and launch the Fitbit app.

This is a very comfortable watch to wear to bed. Moreover, we found it worked best after turning on sleep mode manually from the quick settings menu to silence notifications. You’ll need to swipe down from the top of the watch, then tap the settings toggles and hit the crescent moon icon.
From the Fitbit app, you’ll be able to see a sleep score at the end of each night that breaks down the quality of your sleep based on time spent in different sleep stages. A subscription to Fitbit Premium (see below) will also give you extra data on your sleeping heart rate and restoration. But for nonsubscribers, the app doesn’t offer that many useful recommendations on how to improve that sleep score or reduce restlessness.

Over time, however, especially using the Premium subscription service, the feature’s grown on us. It’s helped identify and address our sleep achievements and deficits, at least a bit. Fitbit’s progress on sleep tracking feels even more notable considering Apple’s complete avoidance of baked-in sleep monitoring on the Apple Watch. Sleep info’s become one of the things that Fitbit does most interestingly. Also, its deeper breakdown of stats feels like a glimpse of where the future of sleep tech could lie.
We’re also looking forward to the smart wake feature, which Fitbit says is coming soon. It will look at your sleep patterns and wake you at an optimal time with vibrations on your wrist.

We followed one of the nutrition programs called Understanding Calories to log meals and help develop some healthier habits.
It’s a nice option to have. But the most intriguing feature for Fitbit Premium users may still be yet to come: a personalized coaching tool is set to launch in 2020 at an additional cost that promises to help manage weight loss or diabetes, for example.

Battery life is among the best

Compared to something like the Apple Watch, one of Fitbit’s big advantages is battery life. Without the always-on display active, we managed to get five-and-a-half full days before needing to charge. With the always-on display turned on, that reduced to just over two full days.

Every Fitbit has its own unique charger, and the Versa 2 is no different.
But the fact that this watch can last most of a week on a single charge is great. It makes charging an occasional thing, not an everyday one, and that’s exactly how smartwatches (or any watches) should be.

Arguably the most significant addition to the Versa 2 is Alexa. You can ask it basic questions, control smart home gadgets and set timers.

Connections to your phone are also limited, so you won’t be able to send messages with your voice via Alexa, for example. (You can, however, respond to text messages on Android with your voice.)
And you can’t use your voice to start a workout on the Versa 2 yet either. Alexa understands different accents and it had no problem with Lexy’s Australian accent. In addition, it supports multiple languages (German, Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese).

Other Versa 2 notes:

We’ve had sporadic connectivity issues on the Versa 2, both when it comes to maintaining a connection with an iPhone and reauthorizing third-party apps like Alexa, Spotify and Strava.
The Bitmoji watch face is almost enough reason to make us get this watch alone. These types of whimsical faces are what make Fitbit’s watch faces so much fun (Apple, seriously, why no Memoji watch face? Why?)
Like the first Versa, you have to load songs via computer and the Fitbit Connect app. Pandora and Deezer’s premium subscriptions allow you to store music on the watch, but the Spotify app only lets you control playback.
While the Versa 2 is Fitbit’s best smartwatch yet, there are plenty of other capable Fitbits. The Versa 2 is a versatile watch that works with iOS and Android and has plenty of fitness tracking features well worth the price.