Fitbit Charge 3 Reviewed

Proof that fitness trackers are still worth your time - for now 

by  Becca Caddy

Smartwatches have become such hot news recently that you’d be forgiven for thinking fitness trackers are a thing of the past.

After all, smartwatches do offer most of the best bits of activity trackers, including more apps, features and good looks for sometimes only £50 more.

But there are still plenty of advantages to choosing a fitness tracker instead. Most smartwatches are bigger, run out of battery quicker and might be packed with more features and apps than you’d ever need. Plus, if fitness is your primary focus, it doesn’t always make sense to splash out on a smartwatch that does so much more.

That’s why we were excited to get our hands on (and wrist into) the new Fitbit Charge 3. It’s a fitness tracker that’s had a decent upgrade from the Charge 2 before it, with waterproofing, better and smarter notifications, an improved UI and more battery life. But is it enough of an upgrade to get people excited rather than shopping for a smartwatch instead?

Design and build: Slick, simple and built for fitness

When it comes to design, Fitbit may have found the sweet spot with the Fitbit Charge 3.

It sits somewhere between super slim trackers, like its Alta and Garmin’s recently released Vivosmart 4, and bigger devices with screens that take up most of your wrist, like the majority of smartwatches or the Fitbit Ionic.

At 19.9mm X 34.5mm it’s just enough screen for you to read stats and notifications with ease and swipe through menus, combining the need for a slim design with practical considerations.

The touchscreen OLED display is clear, bright and easy-to-read in all kinds of environments, including dim lighting, sunshine outdoors and in the pool.

It’s a big winner in the comfort stakes too. It’s light and its silicone wristband is soft but sturdy and thanks to its aluminium buckle will stay secure while you’re sleeping, swimming and doing anything and everything else.

The Charge 2 had a button on the side, but the Charge 3 does away with the physical button and instead replaces it with a small groove that acts as a haptic feedback button. This takes you back to the homescreen while you’re browsing through menus, providing you with a little vibration when it does.

Unlike the Charge 2, the latest version has waterproofing up to 50m so it’s happy to go to the pool or shower and in our testing worked just as well in water as it did out.

When it comes to colours and design, the Charge 3 comes with a black strap and a dark grey aluminium body or with a blue/grey strap and rose gold aluminium, but you can switch out the bands for different colours.

This regular version of the Charge 3 is £129.99, but there’s a special edition that’s packing Fitbit Pay for £40 more, which comes with a lavender woven strap and a rose gold aluminium body or a white sports band and dark grey aluminium body.

Software and features: Easy-to-use and smarter notifications

You can choose from a number of different clock faces that put different stats at the forefront of the Charge 3. There’s one with the digital time and just your heart rate, another that focuses on your steps and a few analogue clock hands options too.

Although some people might be disappointed by the lack of choice, it’s refreshing to have less than 10 options because it keeps the experience simple and focused on the stats rather than looks.

Swipe down from the main screen to view notifications, which for the most part you can click into and read fully. All the notifications, from emails to fertility apps, are easy-to-read and you can view them from all the apps on your phone. You’ll just need to decide in the Fitbit app which you want to be notified about.

Swipe up and you’ll see a Fitbit Today feature, which gets you on track with goals and allows you to see how you’re doing in terms of heart rate, activity stats, sleep and more.

Swiping left opens up the main menu where you can view the main apps offered by the Charge 3, including Exercise features, the Relax breathing exercises, Timers, Alarms, Weather forecast and Settings. We might expect more apps to be added to the Fitbit ecosystem in future, but for now that’s the range you’ll get.

Fitness tracking and smarts: Great for active people, but not fitness lovers

Although the Charge 3 can show you notifications and track your stress levels, it’s main focus is on fitness. It tracks the basics, including steps, calories and sleep. As well as a broad range of activities, including running, cycling, swimming, yoga and circuit training.

It’s really easy to start an activity manually and can be done in four swipes and taps, but there’s also automatic workout detection for running, swimming and elliptical training. We found in our testing that automatic swim and run tracking kicked in effectively, but elliptical exercises didn’t begin so we had to start them manually.

Those who like running outdoors, hiking and cycling will be disappointed that there’s no GPS on-board the Charge 3. But given there’s no on-board music that’s not a surprise. This isn’t a device you’d expect to take out while you’re working out without your phone.

There’s 24/7 heart rate tracking on-board the device thanks to an optical heart rate sensor. On the whole the heart rate readings seemed accurate. Although there was some lag in real-time when tracking heart rate during exercise, especially when hitting high intensities.

But the stats looked much better within the app afterwards, which means that for most people it’ll be a great tracker for reviewing heart rate zones after working out, but if you’re serious about hitting certain heart rate levels while running or doing interval training, it might not be the best option for you.

The heart rate sensor is also used for tracking your heart rate throughout the day and for guided breathing exercises, which are a nice addition during times of stress.

It’s worth mentioning that there is a SpO2 sensor within the Charge 3, just like there is in the Ionic and the Versa. Although in a press release Fitbit explained it isn’t being put to use yet, instead it will open up more detailed health tracking potential in the future, such as “changes in blood oxygen levels and help track new health indicators, like sleep apnea.”

Fitbit has offered a really good sleep tracking experience for some time now, especially with the Versa and more recent models, and the Charge 3 is just as good. When you wake up, the app allows you to see Awake, REM, Light and Deep sleep stages throughout the night.

According to Fitbit, the sleep offering will be further bolstered by a ‘sleep score’ soon, which gives you a quick glance at how well you slept. But, like the SpO2 sensor data, that’s not been added just yet, so we’ll update you when it is.

Battery: Juiced up for the best part of a week

 

According to Fitbit, you can expect up to seven days of battery life from the Charge 3. During our testing it lasted six. That was with about five workouts, lots of swimming and using it at least every hour for either timers, notifications or breathing exercises.

We imagine if you don’t use it for tracking exercise you’re likely to get more out of it, but six days is still a good battery life for an activity tracker that offers plenty of features.

Although it’s worth mentioning that the Fitbit Versa offers four, which isn’t much less for a smartwatch that’s packed with way more apps and features.

Fitbit Charge 3: Verdict 

The Fitbit Charge 3 is an easy-to-use tracker that’s a perfect size, comfortable and good at tracking your fitness and sleep.

The main problem? It feels very similar to the Versa, which we were very fond of. It does mean that the Charge 3 sits in a funny position, as it’s got significantly less features than the Versa, but it’s only £50 less. So for many people opting for the slightly more expensive Versa over the Charge 3 would make more sense.

There are some features that are going to be coming soon, like upgraded sleep tracking that gives you a sleep score, but we’re still twiddling our thumbs waiting.

Fitbit has done a great job with the Charge 3 and as a standalone experience it’s one of the best activity trackers out there. But the brand better start creating products that occupy a more definite space in the range soon, as well as delivering on promised features, if it’s going to compete with the likes of Apple in the long-term.

Stuff says... 

Fitbit Charge 3 review

A capable fitness tracker that’s a good size, comfortable to wear and proves itself as a good companion for keeping tabs on most exercises

Good Stuff 

• Great touchscreen
• Good sleep tracking
• Easy-to-wear design
• Long battery life

Bad Stuff 

• A bit pricey
• Very similar to the Versa
• No GPS
• Fitbit Pay only in special edition

Withings Steel HR Sport Reviewed

Not just a pretty face

by  Natalya Paul

The Withings Steel HR Sport might look familiar, and that’s because it’s the successor of the equally good-looking Nokia Steel HR.

The only difference is a new silicon strap, a logo swap, and a couple of new features which we’ll come to later.

Garmin has taken the spotlight when it comes do-everything smartwatches, and that’s because of the unrivalled sports tracking and the bazillion features on offer.

But let’s be honest, elegant time-pieces they are not.

Withings Steel HR fits into the hybrid category of smartwatches, whilst it does some smarts and some fitness, it doesn’t fully commit enthusiastically to either. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And it might just be why this is the watch of choice for most people.

It sure looks like a pretty ordinary ticker, but with 25-day battery life, excellent heart rate monitoring, smart notifications, GPS (paired with smartphone), a plethora of activity tracking and an excellent health data app, it’s certainly worth your time and money.

DESIGN & BUILD: Athleisure treasure

It’s a case of déjà vu here as it looks incredible similar to the Nokia Steel HR.

Only this time there are numbers etched around the circumference, but they’re so subtle and barely noticeable.

Straight out the box it looks fresh and minimal. We’re testing the version with the white face but there is also the option for a black one too.

The silicon strap here makes the Steel HR look a touch sportier than its predecessors and the fact that there are notches along the entire band is much appreciated, especially for smaller-wristed humans like me.

You can change the strap for something smarter if you prefer too. The stainless-steel bezel is slim with the curved glass over the face, a staple of the series. This adds a certain glisten, elevating this watch to a sleek accessory, at home with suave office attire.

It’s no small feat that it manages to still remain minimal whistle having analogue numbers around the edges of the face, as well as a little OLED screen for notifications, selecting activities and checking up on daily steps and heart rate.

Plus, there's a small analogue sub-dial which shows you a percentage of how close you are achieving you daily goals.

We’ve been swimming too! And the 5ATM rating means it’ll cope up to to 50 metres deep, I probably wouldn't though. I was worried it would steam up in the sauna but to my surprise, it didn’t.

SOFTWARE & FEATURES: Quiet but capable

 

Unassuming in looks, sure, but what kind of smarts are on offer?

Hit the crown and the small OLED display comes to live with white pixels. Hold it down for longer and the cycle through the home screens where you can see your steps, heart rate setting the alarm and checking battery level.

Through the app, you can switch on notifications for: messages, calls, WhatsApp and even Slack. But with that teeny tiny screen don’t expect to be able to read anything lengthy. Sentences slowly scroll horizontally across the screen like the display boards at a train station.

I usually don’t like to receive too many notifications from a watch, but I do like to know when someone is calling me, especially when I’m walking and my phones in my bag on silent. I’ve had this on in the 10 days testing it and have become quite reliant on it.

You’ll get a small vibration when you get a notification which is all you’d really want, nothing too obtuse like some other smartwatches which can make you feel like a lab rat undergoing psychosocial conditioning experiments... Move more!

What would be really nice though, is another phone-freeing feature like NFC payments, but that would come with some considerable bulk and we wouldn't change anything about the design.

FITNESS TRACKING and App: Top of the class

Although the Steel HR now has GPS, which is excellent, it still requires you to have your phone in close proximity. I don’t like to take anything with me when I run and the best thing about dedicated fitness trackers like the Garmin VIvoactiv is that you can totally leave your phone at home.

The Steel HR Sport will, however, automatically detect activity. There’s something amusing or embarrassing (undecided just yet) about seeing a notification saying ‘new activity detected’ the morning after a night on the tiles partaking in some aggressive shape shifting.

I’ve burnt more calories ‘dancing’ in the past 10 days than yoga and running combined.
The variety of fitness tracking is impressive. Running, swimming, cycling are a given – but there’s even yoga, pilates, weights, ice hockey, football and my favourite – dancing.

You can select your 5 most frequent activities to appear on the screen for quick access.

The digital display is usually off by default, but when in activity mode it will switch to always-on so you can see where you’re at. However, in direct sun light it is very difficult to read.

Another cool new feature is the ability to offer VO2 Max estimates, but this is impeded but the GPS occasionally dropping our mid-run.

Sleep tracking: No snoozing on the job

The sleep tracking on the Steel HR sport is brilliant.

Every morning I check the app as it synchs effortlessly and then gives me an overall sleep score based on recommended sleep data. It’ll throw out a graph displaying the hours I've spent sleeping, marking light sleep with a cyan blue and deep sleep with a darker shade. It’ll also mark out any interruptions.

The more sleep data the app collects, the more useful it will become to showing you an average weekday sleep score.

It kindly pointed out that there’s a little bit of discrepancy between sleep at the weekend and sleep during the week and warns of what Dr. Till Roenneberg calls ‘social jetlag’. Which describes how skimping on weekday sleep and then catching up on the weekends isn’t really very good for your health.

It offers useful advice that’s key to getting into a good sleeping routine. It’s really simple. Wake up and go to bed at the same time every night.

In conclusion, I’ve actually started thinking about my sleep and learnt that sleeping in ‘til 11am on a Sunday morning isn’t really going to feel so good in the long run.

Battery Life: Donkey's years

Like Paul McCartney's career, the Withings Steel HR Sport can keep on going and going...and going.

Withings promise 25 days on a single charge, this might be true if not using GPS or if you’re not working out every couple of days as I was. I’ve only charged it once over a 10 day period.

There’s a little neat charging dock where you place the back of the watch face on a circular block and plug the USB into a power source.

After about 30 minutes, I was already up to about 90% from 10% which makes a mockery of all the other gadgets in my life that require charging.

Nokia Steel HR Sport verdict

The Withings Steel HR Sport is the only watch that might persuade me switch from my analogue ticker - so I can finally have a few tricks up my sleeve.

It looks like a regular watch, subtle and stylish, yet there’s so much going on inside and stuff that’s useful for everyday use and people like me, who like to keep fairly fit but aren’t beating themselves up about their Strava rankings.

The sleep tracking and daily goals are everything a hybrid watch should be; there to give you a bit of guidance on how to live a healthier lifestyle.

And for me that’s more dancing and more sleeping, yet I’m worried the two are mutually exclusive...

Where to buy Withings Steel HR Sport: 

Stuff says... 

Withings Steel HR Sport review

One of the most well-rounded stylish hybrids that won’t burn out even when you do

 

Good Stuff 

Stylish design

Great battery life

Loads of activities

Intuitive and useful app 

Bad Stuff 

No NFC payments

No standalone GPS

Fitbit Inspire HR Reviewed

A very fine fitness tracker with smartwatch aspirations £90

by  Andrew Williams

Fitbits are the Coca Cola of the fitness tracker world. Garmin-owning types who run marathons at the weekend for fun may look down on the things, but the public loves them.

The Fitbit Inspire HR is part of its brand new range. And it does just about everything 95% of us need.

It logs your sleep, snags notifications from your phone and thanks to Connected GPS is the perfect partner for a couch-to-5K programme. The Inspire HR is not just a step counter for recovering couch potatoes.

There’s only one glaring bad bit. Three to four days of battery life isn’t good for a tracker like the Fitbit Inspire HR.

Design and build: Ready to sweat

Most Fitbits are the kind of tracker you wear 24/7, and so is the Fitbit Inspire HR. It’s small, it’s light, and so comfortable you could forget you’re wearing the thing.

You get a silicone strap as standard, two of them in different sizes actually, but you can trade up too. Fitbit makes a leather strap, a steel strap and silicone ones with funky patterns. You just flick a lever on the back of each end of the underside to replace the strap.

Unlike the standard Inspire, the Inspire HR also has a “proper” watch-style strap.
Don’t fancy spending an extra wedge for a new look? The Fitbit Inspire HR comes in all-black and lilac as well as the two tone look you see here.

It is ready for just about anything too. Like the hardiest of bands, the Fitbit Inspire HR is 5ATM water resistant. You can wear it in the shower, or the swimming pool. And give it a rinse after a particularly gruelling, sweaty run.

This isn’t a hardcore tracker, mind. The screen covering is plastic rather than toughened glass, so be careful not to scrape it along any brick walls when flailing like Phoebe from Friends when going for a "PB” run time.

Screen and interface: Smooth sailing

The Fitbit Inspire HR has a dinky little monochrome screen. It’s not fancy next to the bolder, colourful Honor Band 4, but it is clear. And thanks to the OLED panel each pixel is a dot of bright light in a sea of perfect black. Lovely.

There are only a handful of clock faces and all but one is digital. But there’s only so much you can do with a low-res black and white screen anyway.

Where Fitbit claws some cred back from a colour rival is the interface. The Fitbit Inspire HR is, like just about every Fitbit ever, nice to use. That may sound a compliment so vague as to be meaningless, but it’s important. There are no weird laggy bits, no badly designed parts to the interface or features that seem too ambitious to work properly. Such things are common in price-gouging budget bands.

For the most part, you just flick up and down on the screen to get to the various features and info pages. Each bounces onto the screen with a charmingly animated transition. Not too plain, not too desperate to inject a thoroughly distinct personality.
It’s nice, see?

Features: Smarty rants 

 

Basic Fitbit bands like this have often been quite restrictive. You might be able to track steps, but not runs. Some only had very basic notifications support, if any at all.

The Fitbit Inspire HR is not a revelation in terms of its features. But it does have just about everything we want in a low-maintenance tracker.

There are two killer parts here. The Fitbit Inspire HR supports notifications from any app you like, not just the SMSs no-one sends anymore and the calendar we forget to keep up-to-date.

WhatsApp and Gmail are the real winners, for us at least. You can read a chunk of messages and email headlines, to tell whether you need to dig out the phone or not. The Fitbit Inspire HR vibrates when these come in, for a veneer of smartwatch-like functionality.

You can read ultra-long messages. You can’t reply to them. You can’t even dig into the notifications you’ve received earlier. It’s just the basics, but perhaps that’s good enough.

Connected GPS is the other biggie, and this is not present in the version of the Fitbit Inspire without a heart rate sensor. This means it’s radically better for runners and gym fans.

The normal Inspire uses activity detection to log runs, walks, swims and cycles automatically. You only get the most basic of stats from these.

Fitbit’s Inspire HR is in a completely different league. It does the same kind of auto exercise tracking, but you can also manually log exercise. Do this and the band hooks onto your phone’s GPS signal to fully map your runs and walks, just like a fancy Garmin runner’s watch.

As there’s a heart rate sensor on the back too, you really do get just about all the same data as such a fitness obsessed tracker. Of course, this only works if you run with your phone. If you don’t, the Fitbit Inspire HR isn’t anywhere near as useful. But most of us run with music or a podcast playing, right?

GPS tracking is accurate, and the heart rate readings are good too. You can make the Fitbit Inspire HR record your heart rate all day and all night, letting you keep an eye on your resting heart rate.

There’s more too. The Fitbit Inspire HR’s heart stats feed into sleep tracking. You see, with the non-HR model you see only the most basic of info: when you were asleep and when you wake up, whether that’s at 2am after a nightmare, or 6am after a nightmarish alarm. This one breaks down each night into the various sleep stages. Those are REM, deep and light sleep. You can really see the difference in sleep quality between a night when you go to bed at a sensible hour, and after a night at the pub. Booze is bad for you: who’d have thought it?

Software and Battery Life: Don't burn out

There are a few little extras too. The Fitbit Inspire HR’s vibrate motor is used for alarms and timers, handy if you want to keep your day extra-organised.

You can set these from the watch itself too.

All the other bits of data end up in the Fitbit app. And this part really needs an overhaul to keep up with these new devices.

The Fitbit app is more fun than most. There’s an adventures section that maps your daily steps onto real-world hikes. And, if you pay for it, you can unlock video workouts in the Coach section.

However, the home screen looks pretty dated at this point. The good news? Fitbit says overhauled software is “coming soon”, so let’s not dwell on the slightly fusty look too much.

Battery life is something a software spruce-up won’t fix, and the Fitbit Inspire HR’s is only passable. Fitbit says it should last up to five days. Switch on features life notifications and track a run or two and you’re looking at 3-4 days.

It’s much better than a Wear OS watch, of course, but just don’t look too closely at the Honor Band 4 or you’ll be put off altogether. Honor’s tracker lasts up to two weeks, with notifications, and it has a colour screen.

This feels like the kind of tracker that should last about a week. It really doesn’t. And it’s the one part of the Fitbit Inspire HR we don’t like much. To recharge you just plop the onto a little magnetised dock, so at least charging is simple.

Fitbit Inspire HR verdict

 

The Fitbit Inspire HR is a great little fitness tracker. As well as the Fitbit staple of step counting, it’s surprisingly good for proper run tracking if you do so with a phone in your pocket. Add notifications and, well, that’s just about everything we want in a low-key band.

Battery life is one part you’ll need to consider. 3-4 days of use with all the good stuff turned on is not a great result. But it’s almost the lone black mark on what is a truly likeable Fitbit that’s good for much more than just step counting.

If you’re weighing up whether to buy this or the basic Inspire, get the Inspire HR. It’s much better.

Stuff says... 

Fitbit Inspire HR review

More than just a step counter, the Fitbit Inspire HR has all the fitness tracking skills most people need

Good Stuff 

Connected GPS means real run tracking

Easy to use

Much more advanced than the standard Inspire

Bad Stuff 

Battery life isn’t great

Best cheap fitness trackers Verdict Reviewed

Choosing the top tracker in this titanic fitness face-off is tricky. The cheapest of the crop see counting steps as their lifelong goal, with all other functionality superfluous to that singular objective; as you go up the budget ladder, progress reports become motivation become bona-fide workout wrist-wrappers.

Of the clip-on measurers, the Shine is the superior being. In a shell sleeker than a finely-crafted steel spoon it packs plenty of the passive tracking smarts you’d expect from a well-priced wearable, and then some.

But if you’re looking for a true fitness friend in your value tracker, there’s nowhere else to look than the Moov Now. Forget day-to-day distances: this is an always-there trainer to get you working out and burning off, in a package you can pick up with enough change from a ton to pick up some dumbbells for fine-toning.

Best cheap fitness tracker Polar Loop 2 $66 Reviewed

 Check It Out On Amazon.com 

Information About Polar Loop 2

Confused styling meets step-sensing smarts, the second coming of Polar’s Loop gets oh-so-close to tracker greatness, but fails to nail the fitness game. The cut-to-fit comfort of the rubberised Loop is perfectly wearable – if you can stomach its inexplicable shiny strips, functionless but for fashion – with waterproof wizardry meaning you can splash through 20m of the wet stuff before it’ll conk out.

What’s more, it works well as a standalone strapper. Employing a single, small touch panel to scroll through time, activity target progress, calories burnt and steps taken, it’s a simple interface built on a battery good for five days at worst.

In fact, as footstep-counters go, it does the duty better than many: daily targets are presented as a gradually filling bar, with your Polar pal telling you just how much of a certain activity you need to do to fulfil your fitness fetish, based on a level selected to suit your lifestyle. Bar half full? Jog for 20 minutes or walk for 45 to crest the peak of pavement performance.

Perpetual notification-missers will also benefit from the Loop 2’s optional vibrations for phone alerts, whilst its 85-LED dot display definitely won’t go unnoticed: bright to the point of painful, there’s no issue spotting it at sunrise to silence the alarm.

So far, so good – unless your workouts involve more than a walk or a run. Stride-counting accuracy is on a par with competitors, but, lacking heart rate sensor smarts (unless paired with a pricey Polar peripheral), the Loop 2 frequently under-rewards abs-crunching challenges or sweaty spin sessions that don’t involve vigorous wrist movements. 

This translates into bar-filling frustration as Polar’s fitness friend insists you still owe it several minutes more movement (risking a dreaded ‘inactivity stamp’ on your calendar, should you refuse), despite your near-death dumbbell session earlier in the day – though periodic ‘time to move’ reminders are a godsend for absent-minded sedentary striders.

After living with the Loop 2, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Polar’s created something more than a pedometer, but not quite a fitness band – a feeling that flows into the app. By default, your up-and-active stats are displayed around a clock face, with blue bands representing moments of movement (darker means better); a tap toggles to a pie chart of active time totals. 

This is all appropriate for annihilating daytime inactivity, but beyond step counts and sleep totals, there’s little here for high-pace pedallers to justify the price-hike over similar, smarter and more stylish sports trackers.

Stuff says: ★★★✩✩

The Polar Loop 2 is no pro-performer when it comes to stat-savvy sports sensing on a pound-pinching budget

Buy Here: 

 $65.53 Amazon 

Best cheap fitness tracker Moov Now (£60) Reviewed

Moov’s Now might look like just another wrist or ankle-mounted movement tracker – albeit one with a unique honeycomb strap – but it’s anything but. In fact, the clue is in the name: this is one wrist-wrapping wearable that wants to get you off the sofa and moving.

Sure, the Moov will track your daily steps and automatically detect your sleep – but those are actually its weakest features, and that data is the hardest to track down in the app.

What’s the Now’s real forte? It’s not a tracker, but a trainer. The focus is on active minutes, in whatever form they take. Moov doesn’t just want you to strap on the Now and climb a few more stairs or take a toddle to the shops; it wants the Now to become your new workout guru.

Whilst it can follow exercises, think casual jogging or Sunday afternoon swimming, the get-up-and-go ethos of the Now is imbued in its bank of guided workouts, complete with voice coaching and rep-counting.

OK, so it relies entirely on your smartphone, meaning you won’t be able to run too far from your handset, but the quality and accuracy of its tracking and training is impeccable. Because sessions are selected at the start, the Now knows what motion to look for and can guide you to great effect as you gurn and grimace through seven minute ab-crunchers, sprint intervals and bicycle burners.

What’s more, it can also pair with third-party heart rate monitors for even better muscle-making monitoring – quite the show from a £60 strapper.

The Moov, then, won’t hold your hand as your stride towards your step goals. It isn’t interested in motivating you to meet your foot-stepping fitness fantasies. Instead, the Now wants to replace your gym subscription and get you properly burning off the burgers, with real-world workouts on your wrist.

Stuff says: ★★★★★

A real gem of a fitness band that does so much more than just track your steps

Best cheap fitness tracker Misfit Shine (£50) Reviewed

The Misfit Shine is a £50 tracker that feels anything but cheap: a sliver of silver aircraft-grade aluminium to make Apple fans jealous, its metallic shell packs smarts as sleek as its exterior.

Whether you wrist-mount the Misfit or attach it to yourself with its silicone magnet strap – not the strongest of fixing solutions, but mighty stylish – the Shine generally tracks accurately, except when its stuck to your shirt.

What’s more, the Shine is far and away the best budget bounding buddy to use as a standalone solution. A quick double-tap on its top brings up an array of white lights on the clock-like display that show your progress as a percentage of a circle, followed by pulsing lights to indicate the time. Like an Audi’s headlights, they’re striking because they’re subtle – and that light-on-metal contrast is majestically magnificent.

Best of all, Misfit hasn’t sacrificed substance in its delivery of style. The Shine is fully waterproof, so it has the smarts to be a swimming sensor, as well as a range of activity tracking options activated with a quick triple–tap.

The only niggle is that triple-tap tagging is a pre-determined process. Sure, it’s simple, but you have to tell the app what the tag should mean before you hop on your bike or start pounding the pavement – and sleep mode comes under the same option. That said, exercises are easily re-assigned after the fact, so selection isn’t such a chore.

We’re less keen on the Misfit app and its focus on filling your daily points circle, and discovering in-depth data requires a bit of delving – but that’s a minor downside for such a sterling piece of pedestrian kit.

Stuff says: ★★★★✩

A top fitness tracker going for less than £50. What's not to like?

Best cheap fitness tracker Fitbit Zip (£35) Reviewed

You know the MO: an entry-level activity tracker that does only the basics but does them well, with a solid partner app and a bit of funky styling to make it stand out.

At least, that’s what the Fitbit Zip ought to have been about before it went on a feature diet, and not in a good way. Sure, it tracks steps fairly accurately – in line with the competition – and has an incredibly straightforward tap-to-scroll interface that cycles through time, number of steps, distance, calories and a kooky emoji.

Sadly, that also happens to be just about all it does. That little smiley face is essentially the only modicum of motivation the Zip will offer and, whilst its bitty LCD display is a not unwelcome throwback to Gameboy's glory days, the lack of a backlight means no data updates after dusk.

Does it pack any fast-paced punches in the live-tracking stakes? If you’re a runner, yes: activate exercise mode and it’ll follow you with GPS whilst hitting you with updates through your phone. If you’re not a runner, no. Running is the only exercise it can cope with.

Still, at least the app is good. Of all the trackers we tested, it has the cleanest, easiest to use interface, with instant stats and target progress on display, as well as easy meal inputs and weight logging.

Unfortunately, this also lead us to feel that the Fitbit package is more of an app with a belt-clip accessory than the other way around. Whilst £35 might sound suitably petite, it’s not really worth it for an app n’ clip combo. Want to track sleep? You can only activate that from the app, which is a nightmare if you’ve dived under the duvet and left your phone on the desk.

Even the Fitbit’s get-up is generic: a sort of rounded teardrop module housed in a silicone clip case, it felt secure but was hardly head-turning.

Stuff says: ★★★✩✩

After a few weeks of using the Zip, you realise why Fitbit named it that: you get pretty much zip

Best cheap fitness tracker Misfit Ray (£80) Reviewed

Is the Misfit Ray a case of style over substance? That was my first thought as I strapped it to my wrist, but it turns out this basic-looking bracelet is anything but.

That’s because Misfit has crammed almost exactly the same tech found in the Shine 2 into its compact cylindrical body. There’s no heart rate tracking, and you’ll need your phone in a pocket to map your runs with GPS, but it’s tough to complain for £80.

You do get step tracking, silent vibration alarms, sleep monitoring and movement reminders, though - plus they’ve even thrown in some basic phone notifications for good measure.

The tiny multi color LED can’t tell you whether you’re getting a crucial work email or simply another annoying spam text message, but is pretty handy as a subtle reminder to check your phone when you’ve got a second.

You’ll squeeze 6 months of juice from the three tiny watch cell batteries Misfit bundles in the box - impressive stuff considering the Ray handles (limited) phone notifications too. The app gives you a heads-up when it’s time to buy more batteries, which is a nice touch.

Step tracking clocks in a little lower than other trackers, but the Ray stays consistent. Anyway, the smartphone app is so bare-bones that it shouldn’t make much difference - you’re not going to be strapping this on to run a marathon.

It’ll pick out light and moderate exercise from your regular daily walking, and you can tag each one as a run, swim, cycle, football match, or game of tennis. The list isn’t all that comprehensive, and you can’t tell it you’re about to start an activity; if you’re into your bikram yoga, all that sweat might not be registered.

There’s some simple social stuff here, but you’re not going to get detailed insights into your fitness and nutrition. At least you don’t have to count calories, with Misfit’s points system keeping things simple.

Anyway, let’s be honest - the Ray is all about looking good, not getting all hot and sweaty.
The anodized aluminium tube shape won’t clash with a watch (if you wear one) and blends in with any other jewellery you might have on. It’ll survive underwater down to 50m, so you don’t have to leave it on the side when you hit the pool, and the basic sports band is a lot more secure than other cheapo trackers we’ve tried.

Misfit knocked it out of the park with the Shine 2, and the Ray is just a new look version for anyone that already wears a watch. Don’t mind your wrist looking like the high-tech version of a festival addict? Strap on the Ray and start counting those steps.

STUFF SAYS: ★★★★✩

You'll either think it's a style icon or a fashion faux pas - but whatever you decide, the Ray is a simple fitness tracker that gets the job done

Best cheap fitness tracker Jawbone Up Move (£30) Reviewed

From the makers of the marvellous Up3, Jawbone’s Up Move is a back-to-basics clip-on you can pick up for under £40.

Whilst you can slap it on your wrist with the bundled strap should you so desire, it’s happiest when slotted into its rubber clip housing and attached to a belt, bra or anywhere else you feel happy having a pebble-like piece of plastic dangling from your person. 

It’s about as svelte as a fluorescent children’s toy, but it feels pretty robust when holstered on the hip – which also happens to be the most accurate step-tracking position.

Talking of tracking, the Move is generally a spot on surveyor of strides. Sure, it detects a few phantom paces here and there, but for everyday monitoring it’s reliable enough to make it useful.

Is it a motivator? Well, yes and no. So much of what cash-conscious trackers have to offer depends on their physical interfaces and companion apps – and the Up Move does deliver on both fronts.

Its smartphone companion is a colour-pop stat-fest that instantly illustrates your latest step tally and sleep data in handy vertical bars, as well as a timeline of your previous activities and the option to input food for the full Smart Coach experience – complete with goal setting and get-fit tips. It’s so clear even your Nan could use it.

The trickiest thing about living with the Move is its similarity to a dozy puppy. If you pat it constantly it’ll stay awake and be your best friend; but forget to fondle its face and it’ll soon lose interest.

Double click the Up for progress; double click and hold to begin tracking an activity (which you specify later in the app); triple click and the Move will follow you to the land of nod. It’s all very straightforward, and the bold, light-up bars on its round frontage make it easy to see what it’s up to.

But that’s also the problem: it’s just a tracker. Syncing is manual and you have to seek out progress updates, which, yes, means it has a battery life measured in months, but also severely limited motivational abilities.

Stuff says: ★★★★✩

As a penny-saving pedestrian package the Up Move has appeal, but it’s hard to get away from the feeling that it’s essentially a glorified pedometer

Best cheap fitness trackers Withings Go Reviewed

Not everyone needs a whizz-bang fitness tracker that'll keep watch on you through marathons, bike road races, lengths of the swimming pool, and all the other sports fitness freaks seem to do purely to make the rest of us look bad.

Withings' latest tracker is meant for anyone that'd rather have an extra hour in bed than get up and hit the gym. Forget more complex features such as heart-rate-tracking or annoying inactivity alarms - the Go is all about simplicity.

Instead, you get basic step and sleep tracking in a super-simple wearable that's barely any bigger than a £2 coin. It clips on to your clothes, your shoes or your keys, or you can wear it on your wrist like a watch. Nor will you need to slip it off to hop in the shower - it's waterproof down to 50m, so you can even hit the pool or open water. As a further bonus, the coin cell battery inside it keeps ticking for at least eight months, and replacements will only set you back a few quid each - which definitely beats plugging it in every night. 

An E Ink screen means it can double up as a wristwatch, a feature that at this price is rarer than a weight loss plan that actually works; just prod the screen and it switches from showing your steps to telling the time. Aside from that, though, you'll need to pull out your smartphone to get more anything more useful than the details of how far you've wandered in the past 24 hours. That's a bit annoying but hardly unusual and on the plus side, Withings' Health Mate app is impressively easy to use, if a little simple.

You can add weight, heart rate, blood pressure and create a food log if you want to get a better grasp of your wellbeing, but you'll have to do it all manually - the Go only measures steps and sleep, after all. Reminders are handy, giving you a nudge to hop on the scales, or not to shirk off that run you've been planning since that extra bagel at breakfast - just bear in mind that they only show up on your phone, not the Go. 

During the day, the Go calculates distance and calories burned based on how many steps you clock up, adding in duration, start time and distance when it detects you're running or swimming. Sleep tracking is a touch more basic: it works out when you fell asleep and whether it was a light or deep sleep, but there's nothing here to help you get a better night's rest.

But then that approach sums up the Go, really. In fact, the clue's in the name: the Go is about getting you started, thinking more about your fitness and how much exercise you're getting every day rather than bombarding you with stats. It's simple, sure, but the watch mode is a nice little bonus and it helps that is doesn't put a massive dent in your wallet either.

STUFF SAYS: ★★★✩✩

Does the basics well and the screen is a bonus, but it'll lose its appeal once you're ready to do more than walk and sleep.