After many years of buying Fitbits I've paid up and moved to an Apple Watch. I've just had so many battery failures (in early years it was straps) that I felt a 2 year plus one month life for R2,500 to R3,000 was no longer worth it. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has got 4+ years life out of their Fitbit. At least with an Apple Watch I can pay for a service or even a battery replacement.
Nope, FitBit has pretty poor quality hardware, my entire family had them, I think only one managed over a year and then just died from one day to the next.
Deaths were:
2x software update that bricked it (Charge 3, Versa)
1x screen shatter from going to a humid place (Zanzibar, friend has his shatter while in the bathroom due to steam vapor, so don't even take it into the same room as a shower...) (Charge 2)
1x screen shatter from car crash, so not manufacturer's fault. (Charge 2)
1x not sure what killed it, family member had it on nightstand, when woke up was dead. (Charge 3)
Just the one wasn't refunded by Takealot, trying to replace e.g. the versa the person at the counter was like "I hope you asked for refund as these constantly come back", he'd had 6 of them returned that week.
We're now at 3 Samsung watches, a cheap Fit 3, this is actually an amazing watch for the price, super long battery life, step tracking is good, messages and calls come through, only lacks GPS.
Active 2 (2 years now) and Watch 3 (1 year in a few weeks) have both been great, haven't actually even scratched them yet while my charge 2 was a bit of a mess while I was a lot more careful with it, I've swum in rivers with the Watch 3, no issue, and GPS seems pretty good on it as well, I'm very excited about the Watch 4, though think I will wait for Watch 5 before upgrade.
The new chipsets finally being released for Android side means they'll finally have SoCs that aren't low power from 2013/4, now just low power from like 2018 designs, but that's fine. The non QC chipsets is one of the major reasons that Huawei and Samsung watches were so much better than e.g. Fossil.
