Just Keep Running: Fitbit Blaze VS Charge 2

If you’re a fan of retro fashion, you’ll enjoy the visual style of the Fitbit Blaze. The exaggerated shapes and simple approach to attaching to your wrist makes you think of Huey Lewis and the News as soon as you put it on for the day.

Along with a fashionable design, the Fitbit Blaze is comfortable to the arm. It’s especially noticeable if you have spent any time with the Apple Watch, which we now consider to be fully inferior both products we looked at for this Fitbit Blaze vs. Charge 2 comparison.

Unlike other products on the market, the Blaze’s screen isn’t always on. We see this as an advantage, not causing too many distractions throughout the day if you happen to catch a glimpse of the Blaze in the corner of your eye.

The touchscreen included on the Blaze will dim and turn off after a few seconds, but with a simple raise of your wrist, it knows to turn back on. This is excellent when you unconsciously move your arm but don’t intend to activate the Blaze – it has to recognize a specific motion without actually spamming you with screen activations.

As expected, the Fitbit Blaze tracks your steps, number of stairs that you have taken, ho long you have been asleep, and how your heart is performing. You have access to a massive color touchscreen and buttons on the side of the device.

If you need to, you can get updates in the middle of your workout on your heartrate and the pace at which you’re exercising. You can use up to four different watch faces, and they are easy to read despite the relatively small size of the display. The Blaze includes a stopwatch and timer just in case you need access to them.

The Fitbit Blaze uses several multitasking functions to give you the sense that your whole world is attached to your wrist. You’ll see the number of incoming phone calls and you can read any text messages you receive while wearing the Fitbit Blaze. You can also control any music playing from your phone with the buttons on the watch, but that’s as far as the features reach. This is, after all, not a smart watch.

Although the absence of more features might turn off some previous owners of other smart watches, you need to remember that this model is not built for competition. In fact, if you actively dislike the idea of a smart watch, the Fitbit Blaze is exactly what you need. You can sync the Blaze’s display to the GPS on your phone, but it isn’t mandatory.

The Blaze can tell the difference between a passing workout and what it considers an “active” exercise. When you are at it for more than ten minutes, the Fitbit Blaze records your activity, and gives you a detailed readout that you can compare to every other session you’ve had.  

The Fitbit Blaze will last you for four days on a full charge. That’s a good chunk of time for a watch that gives you fine details on your exercise patterns, but the charger itself is awkward and finicky. That sums up the entire experience with the Fitbit Blaze: a bit clunky and still finding itself. What can you say about the Fitbit Blaze that hasn’t already been said (and featured) in other watches? It’s an excellent device for those who may have never used a Fitbit before, but it also needs to figure out what it wants to be.

We liked our time with the Fitbit Blaze, but it’s going to take a bit more probing to figure out who is the winner in the debate of Fitbit Blaze vs. Charge 2.

As you can tell from the name, the Fitbit Charge 2 is the second model in the Charge family. The original model remains the bestselling Fitbit model in company history, so it only makes sense that Fitbit wants to improve upon its success.

Have they managed to replicate what the first Blaze did? How does this sway the debate in the Fitbit Blaze vs. Charge 2 discussion? Let’s get into what makes the Charge 2 tick.

Unlike the Blaze, the Fitbit Charge 2 looks like a fitness tracker from the beginning. You won’t mistake this for a watch. The screen is four times the size of the original Charge, and it connects to your GPS signal to encourage you to move harder and faster than before.

The minimalist screen, despite its size, is excellent for focusing on your workout while you monitor some basic statistics about your movement. You’ll get readouts whether you are walking, using an elliptical machine, or hiking in the woods. The same alerts you have access to with the Blaze will show up on the Charge 2’s screen, such as incoming calls and calendar notifications.

Here, we run into some unfortunate issues with the Charge 2. There is a fundamental flaw in the performance of this tracker related to distance. While we used the GPS sync feature to match up distance traveled with our phones, we noticed that the distance was not accurate on the Charge 2. Whether we used it during hiking in the wilderness or during a session with an indoor machine, there were severe inconsistencies with distance recording on the Fitbit Charge 2.

Forums continue to discuss the problems experienced with the Fitbit Charge 2, and it’s unfortunate that the company has yet to address them. They claim to have patched the system software. Unfortunately, during a further review, we still noticed that distances recorded in the Charge 2 did not measure the same as on a GPS device.

A basic feature like a pause function should be automatically added to every fitness tracker, wouldn’t you think? Not here. Fitbit did not consider this idea for the Charge 2, another confusing omission of something that would be considered standard issue by now. If you go into the Charge 2’s relax mode, you’re forced to hold still and concentrate on your breathing without any multitasking.

This isn’t to say that the Charge 2 is all doom and gloom. The Fitbit app works across all mobile device operating systems, so those of you that are clinging to a Windows phone for dear life are in luck. You’ll get statistics on floors climbed, how many calories you have spent throughout the day, and how many total minutes you have spent exercising. If you also want to keep track of how much water you’ve been drinking throughout the day, you can enter that yourself.

The Fitbit Charge 2 will last for nearly an entire week on a full charge. If you’re the type who doesn’t remember to charge anything other than your phone, this is wonderful news. Granted, there are other devices that hold charges for even longer periods, but when we’re comparing this to the 24 hours you get with an Apple Watch, the Charge 2 performs like a beast.

We hoped to see some improvement in the Charge 2, especially considering the popularity of its previous incarnation. The problem still remains in the most basic of problems: distance tracking, one of the reasons anyone wants to get a Fitbit in the first place. Without a straight answer on how they claim to have fixed this issue, we can’t give a full recommendation for the Fitbit Charge 2.