Fitness Tracker Fitbit Flex2
Fitness Tracker Fitbit Flex2
- Very basic tracking skills
- Auto-recognition of different exercises
- No screen, just LEDs
Let’s deal with what the Flex actually does apart from sitting on your wrist. There are five little LEDs on the brain of the Flex 2, that tell you how close you are to your daily steps goal, and light up when you get certain notifications.
One of them is a color LED that changes depending on the message relayed. Reminders to move are purple, calls fire up yellow and it’s blue for WhatsApp or SMS messages.
One of the Flex 2’s issues is that it doesn’t make this clear anywhere apart from the in-app Flex 2 guide that few people will read.
The other main feature is a vibration motor that buzzes when you get these notifications, or to wake you up using the Silent Alarm feature.
In the Fitbit app, you can set a time to be woken up with a nagging buzz on your wrist. It takes a bit of getting used to, but is a bit less offensive than some of your phone’s inbuilt tones.
What the Fitbit Flex 2 lacks are any extra bits of fitness hardware. There’s no heart rate sensor and no GPS, so if you want those you’ll have to buy one of Fitbit’s more expensive wearables. The Fitbit Ionic and the Fitbit Surge for example has both GPS and heart rate tracking, but both come at a much higher cost.
There’s not even any kind of clock on the Flex 2, or an altimeter to count how many flights of stairs you tackle. It’s a minimal tracker.
This means it’s only really useful as a light way to check up on roughly how many steps you take each day, a reminder to get off your posterior more.
It tallies calories and distance as well, but we’d advise not looking too hard at these figures. While the Fitbit Flex 2 has a clever-enough algorithm to discount any arm movements you make while at your desk (this may depend on how much you wave a fist at your laptop/monitor), no wrist-worn tracker is that accurate. Take them as loose measurements.
The Flex 2 can also remind you to move each hour if you haven’t taken at least 250 steps. It can be annoying, but is a good idea if your goal is to become a bit more active.
Fitbit has a go at using software to appeal to the more active among you, with auto-recognition of different kinds of exercise.
When you run, or use the elliptical machine at the gym for 15 minutes or more, the Flex 2 will monitor the cadence or your movements to auto-add these kinds of exercise to your daily activities as separate entries.
The only exception to this auto-recognition is swim tracking, which you need to manually switch on, as it apparently has an impact on battery life and is switched off as standard.
That aside, the Flex 2 is a handy way to tally-up your gym sessions and jogs without doing so manually. It also separates out longer walks.
This is one of the best bits of the Fitbit software, making what are effectively quite simple measurements of your arm movements seem a whole lot richer. You can find exactly how long it took you to walk to the train station on the way to work, for example.
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