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Fitbit Ionic: A Second Look


So, I may have given the Ionic a little bit of the short shrift. It has remained on my wrist since I wrote that last review, and it is starting to grow on me thanks to a configuration change.

On my initial test with all the default settings in place, I was getting about 3-4 days of battery life. As smartwatches go, that's fantastic, but as someone who is obsessive about checking the time, I was starting to wonder if that would be the top end of my battery life once I started checking it checking it as often as I'd like to know.

One of the problems out of the box with the Ionic, and this seems to hold true with the other "wake to rise" sport watch I tried once - the LG Watch Sport, was that it would light up on its own all the time in the shower and just through normal wrist movements but only part of the time when I was actually raising my wrist to check it. I wondered how much battery that was wasting, so I set it to manual wake (ie, I have to hit the menu button on the side to wake it) and the screen timeout to 10 seconds.

The results? Gamer changer. The watch has transformed into a 10 day powerhouse! I'm literally going through about 10% per day. Yes, I now need to have another free hand to check the time, but that's easily worth the tradeoff for getting about 3x the battery life. Also, I rarely even hit the 10 second timeout anymore, since I just turn off the screen as soon as I see the stats I want to see since my finger is already there. My "range anxiety" is now all but gone. I literally have 2 days (!) to get to a wall charger once the low battery indicator comes on - simply amazing.

As often as I like to change up my wristwear, it's hard to say if I'll stick with this long-term and not end up going back to some combination analog wrist watch with separate fitbit tracker. But, this thing is definitely making a compelling case for being my full-time wrist companion.

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