Gadget

A device to start reinventing yourself – today

Arthur Goldstuck

Forget about New Year’s Resolutions that began on January 1. By now, that’s probably what you’ve done anyway. By the end of January, eight out of ten people are likely to have failed to maintain their resolutions. That means the gyms are getting less crowded, friends and colleagues are becoming less painful about brief obsessions, and the media has stopped trying to make you feel guilty.

But there is another reason 1 January was an appalling date to start trying to improve yourself. Not only were you likely to be in recovery mode, but you were also firmly in holiday mode, with little incentive to get out of bed on the day. It also meant that, as you and your body emerged from vacation inertia, it remained inordinately difficult for several weeks to get motivated. And that translates into January and February being recipes for failure of resolve.

This is why the new date for kicking off New Year’s resolutions should be 1 March. By then, you are fully back in the swing of adulting, the world has stopped pressurising you to change yourself, and you can set your own pace. This also means that you can tackle your resolutions step by step, rather than going for the big bang approach.

This revelation came to me as I began exploring the functionality of what is arguably the best fitness monitoring device on the market. The Fitbit Versa 2 looks good, works well as a smartwatch, and has tremendous functionality onboard. But use it in tandem with the Fitbit app, and it becomes the wellness assistant that your doctor could never be.

First, those looks.  Aesthetically, the Versa 2 has a far better design than the original Versa 1, opting for a more square design and a better AMOLED display instead of a regular LCD display. This makes it far easier to read the screen in brighter daylight conditions, and helps the smartwatch save battery life by not illuminating every pixel. It offers customisable watch faces, from a community-based library. Want your watch to display Van Gogh’s Starry Night? It’s yours, with a few clicks.

The body is made of aluminium, which gives a nod in the right direction to those who prefer a smarter looking smartwatch. This places it in the league of the most expensive smartwatches, while still retailing at less than half the cost –  under R4,000 compared to the Apple Watch starting at R9,000.

Visit the next page to read more about the functionality of the Versa 2.

The bells and whistles include Fitbit Pay, Spotify controls, all-day heart rate monitoring, and a 5+ day battery life. 

Wait, Fitbit Pay? That’s a virtual wallet built into the watch, which allows credit cards to be linked and loaded. I didn’t believe it, but tried it: when presented with a credit card machine with tap-and-pay functionality, I opened the wallet, and tapped the phone. I was as surprised as the merchant when the payment went through instantly.

That is the most significant clue that the Versa 2 has moved dramatically beyond basic fitness and watch functionality. This is partly thanks to Fitbit making major changes to its operating system. The Versa comes with Fitbit OS 4 out of the box, which provides a vast set of features, like viewing and scrolling through long messages, handling quick replies from the watch and voice control.

The Alexa voice control feature is useful for quick conversions between, for example, pounds and grams while cooking, finding out the exchange rate between the Rand and the Dollar, and even controlling the lights in a smart home.

If upgrading from Fitbit Versa 1, which ran Fitbit OS 2, you immediately find that the apps are much snappier, making it less and less necessary to bring out your phone to get things done. From changing a song on Spotify to ordering a ride on Uber to tracking a run with Strava, the Versa 2 has become an interface to the smart world.

Deezer subscribers can save up to 300 songs directly on the device, which allows one to pair Bluetooth earphones directly to the Versa for a “no-phone” exercise experience. The open nature of Fitbit OS’s app market allows for other streaming platforms to develop apps for the smartwatches.

Visit the next page to read about the life-changing features of the Versa 2.

So far, so convenient. But not yet life-changing. Now, combine it with the app on the smartphone – and with some new-start resolutions – and it becomes a personal wellness coach. The standard stuff is all there: tracking numerous exercise types, counting steps, and monitoring heart rate. 

It’s not all low-calorie wine and roses, though. Fitbit insists that repetition-type exercise can only be customised by time, and not by actual repetitions. So you cannot set a target for number of push-ups or sit-ups for example – only the time spent doing it. But that’s not how mere mortals exercise. 

I’ve raised this with Fitbit several times over the years, they’ve always said it’s a good idea, but they’ve never done anything about it. Well, here’s Earth calling Fitbit again: if you call it repetitions, allow users to track repetitions!

That said, the Versa, paired with the app, does go a few steps further: It measures sleep on several levels – including hours in different sleep stages, and estimated blood oxygen variation – assigns a sleep score based on analysis of all the data, and offers advice to improve the score.

The often-ignored truth about fitness and wellness is that one of the biggest contributors to well-being is a good night’s sleep. Sleep monitoring is common on activity monitors, but we are now seeing it integrated into a health regime – if you are willing to use it.

And then there is one of the most subtle commonly available health measures of all: “resting heart rate”. This is, often, an ultimate measure of cardiac health. The evidence lies in the fact that, the more regularly you exercise, and the better you sleep, the more your resting heart rate comes down. The Versa tracks this over time, and presents a 30-day graph to give you a precise picture of how your behaviour affects your resting heart rate.

On a personal level, my most fascinating insight into resting heart rate was the direct relationship between improved quality of sleep and decrease in that rate. Add daily exercise, and there is again a direct relationship.

Correlate sleep and exercise with resting heart rate, and you suddenly have the clearest incentive to clean up your act.

There is one further step that some may regard as an obsession too far: logging your food, to measure how many calories you take in daily, and what proportion is made up of carbs, fat, and protein. The app provides a colour coded graph showing the proportion of calories that should be taken in relative to what is burnt. Hint: eat healthy foods and burn more calories than you take in, and your weight starts decreasing.

I tried it. And reached my goal weight in less than two months – after having tried unsuccessfully for more than five years, usually with the attempted assistance of older Fitbit models.

All taken together, this is a recipe for getting your life on track, for pursuing resolutions one by one, eventually combining them, and finally turning a watch into your own private watcher.

Visit the next page to read more about the specs of the Versa 2.

Specs of the Fitbit Versa 2

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