Apple Watch Review Diary - Fitness Features/Tracker


The fitness tracking feature of the Apple Watch was one of my big interests. I've been wearing a Fitbit One for over two years and it's been working well for me. I know it's pretty accurate because I'm a big nerd and have spreadsheets. I've tested it (and other trackers) walking on a track and I've got calorie diaries showing it's pretty accurate way to measure calorie output.

So, I'm using my Fitbit One as my benchmark for the Apple Watch. The first couple full days step/distance tracking was pretty off. 27% and 33% under my Fitbit. Then I tried doing a 40 minute calibration walk with an outdoor walking session. The idea is if you walk with your Apple Watch outside while holding your iPhone, the iPhone will calibrate the watch based on GPS data. This is why you want to do a 20 minute outdoor session, per Apple.

That outdoor session was right on money vs Fitbit. Literally two steps off. The rest of the day was close at 4% difference. The day after I did another 40 minute walking session and the entire day was 3% off. So I thought I had figured this out and I'd have a good new tracker. But then the next day it was 21% below my Fitbit. And this day I even did a 25 minute outdoor session, which should have helped calibrate further. So, I don't know. I guess I'll just keep tracking and see how it goes. My Fitbit One I keep in my pants pocket, which I always found to be more accurate than wrist trackers. So, that could simply be a sensor location issue. What can be as important as accuracy is consistency, so if the Apple Watch difference can calibrate to be consistent, that should work. Still 20-30% under is a big difference.

Beyond the inconsistency issues, the tracker is pretty straight forward. You can set how many active calories you want to burn in a day. I set mine to 500 and by default the watch has me doing 30 minutes of active time and standing up every 50 minutes or so. There's no way to change active minutes or activity reminder goal. All this is tracked on the watch and in the iOS app. I can see my goals and my progress towards my goals right on the watch with occasional encouragements.

One note on the stand up reminders. This is one new feature for me since my Fitbit One doesn't do activity reminders. I've used it before while testing other devices and I like the feature. While it can sometimes be a nusance to stop what you're doing, I usually find stepping away at least once in an hour keeps me fresh. I've been a minor fan of pomodoro timers to break every 25 minutes. So, I'd like be able to adjust this time, if I wanted. Either way, I like having this feature now.

One thing missing is the watch doesn't track stairs. There's a stair stepper exercise loaded and Apple's site uses taking the stairs as an example of tracking, but it must simply track stairs as steps. If you have your iPhone with you, it will track stairs through its sensors, but that requires carrying the iPhone unlike with other activities.

Lastly it's worth noting that when doing exercise session, the watch remembers your last and best session info. So you can work to improve or at least be consistent.

All this data gets dumped into the Health app on the iPhone, which does a nice job of displaying things in charts and graphs.