Fitbit Ultra review

Fitbit Ultra is a smart clip-on device which uses accelerometers to monitor your movement. It acts as a pedometer to see how many steps you take every day, a stair counter to tell you how many flights you’ve climbed and – almost uniquely among fitness products – a sleep tracker. It clips on to your clothing and, once you’ve uploaded the data via a proprietary wireless dongle, tracks everything via your account on the Fitbit website. This also lets you monitor the calories and macronutrient content (protein, carbohydrate, fat, and so on) of your food.

It’s a great idea for encouraging gentle exercise. We loved the graphs showing the amount of time we’d spent active over the course of the day, and the sleep graph is particularly useful if you’re prone to insomnia or just trying to make sure you get enough rest. Like Fitbit’s other tracking functions, sleep detection is motion based – if you’re still, it registers you as asleep and if you move around a lot, it logs you as being awake. It proved to be remarkably accurate and encouraged us to keep our sleep times regular.

The pedometer and stair counter work in much same way, using a 3-dimensional accelerometer and an altimeter to detect the way in which you’re moving. However, this style of motion-based tracking means that the vast majority of exercises won’t be detectable to the Fitbit. This includes popular activities such as cycling and strength training. Swimming’s also not an option, because the Fitbit isn’t waterproof. You can manually log untrackable activities using the web interface and either enter calorie burn yourself or allow the site to calculate it.

Manually-logged activities of this sort don’t count towards the daily goals Fitbit encourages you to achieve, which can be a frustrating. It doesn’t matter if you’ve cycled 50km and spent an hour in the weight room – the website will still tell you that you’re below par for the day if you’ve taken fewer than 10,000 footsteps.

If you’re a runner, a keen walker or just trying to get a bit more physical activity into your day, the Fitbit’s a really great way of tracking your activity. The graphs and charts that show how much you’ve done in a day are really inspiring, particularly if you keep them open in the background while you go about your daily routine. You’re awarded badges when you achieve something noteworthy, such as climbing enough stairs in your lifetime to reach the flight altitude of a helicopter, which is a fun bit of gamification. We ended up climbing 91 flights of stairs in the course of one day, just to see how far we should push it, but then we are particularly susceptible to this kind of thing.

The Fitbit also works out how many calories you burn throughout the day. We appreciated this feature, as it gives a live and fairly realistic assessment of how many calories your body is consuming on any given day. If you’re trying to gain or lose weight, the website can also calculate how large a calorie surplus or deficit you should be working towards. To use this, you can – and should – log every item you eat, as well as all your exercise.

This is where Fitbit’s biggest failing becomes obvious. Most calorie logging sites rely on user-added data about food to a greater or lesser extent. However, because Fitbit has only recently launched in the UK, none of the foods in its database are relevant to this country. It doesn’t know what fish fingers are, is clueless about Creme Eggs and wouldn’t know a Yorkshire pudding if you threw one at it. You can add nutritional information manually, but this rapidly becomes tiresome when you have to do it for every single thing you eat. It also compares very poorly to rival logging sites such as MyFitnessPal, which contains a wealth of accurate data about British foodstuffs. There isn’t even a quick-entry option so you can simply log how many calories you’ve eaten.

The Fitbit website also lacks the supportive, diverse and very active communities that other tracking sites benefit from. There are a few quiet message boards and a number of public groups, but these are again oriented towards US users. There’s no search function, either, so the only way to find out which of 1,050 groups suits you is to scroll through them, twelve at a time.

The product’s box and website also promise integration with other services. While some are almost entirely oriented towards Americans, there’s also support for Nike+ tracking devices, Foursquare, and the Endomondo GPS app for mobile phones and Garmin hardware. Other integration apps are still in development, including one that will allow the Fitbit to work with MyFitnessPal. We only hope that – when and if this is released – it’ll provide access to MyFitnessPal’s more UK-friendly food database.

The Fitbit Ultra hardware is great – it clips on unobtrusively, lasts days without charging and displays useful data about how you’re progressing. The website is clearly-designed, but its calorie tracking is rendered almost useless by the absence of UK products. If this weren’t the case, we’d be happy to recommend Fitbit to anyone who wanted to watch their calories and get a bit more active. Right now, though, it’s not worth its £80. If you want to improve your fitness, you’re better off with a pedometer or a budget Heart Rate Monitor, such as Polar’s FT7, and a free calorie and exercise tracking service.