More Factors to Consider
Aside from looking at accuracy, battery life, and durability, there are a few more key factors you can look at before buying a fitness tracker.
Weight
A lightweight fitness tracker feels amazing on the wrist. For activities like running, biking, and swimming, the lighter the fitness tracker, the better. The Coros Pace 3 and the Garmin Forerunner 265 are two of our lightest fitness trackers we recommend.
When it comes to strength training, hiking, trail running and more, a fitness tracker with strong materials that prioritizes durability might be a better choice. The downside is some of these watches are heavier than some might prefer. Our hack? Opt for spending more if there’s a lighter metal available—like with the Suunto Race titanium edition versus the stainless steel.
Music Storage
A handful of our fitness trackers above come with memory to store music offline. This is a great feature to have if you like to use your fitness tracker without your phone nearby. Consider the amount of memory in your fitness tracker if you like to listen to music offline, without using data to stream from your preferred music app.
Sleep Tracking
A lot of the latest fitness trackers (and smart watches) are coming with sleep tracking features. We’ve written about sleep trackers a number of times. We like the tech, but it’s important to note sleep trackers will not improve sleep. They will just provide you with data to interpret your sleeping patterns and make adjustments (which can be a huge payoff for some).
Some of our fitness trackers include sleep tracking data in recovery scores and training readiness scores. The main example of this would be in the Garmin Forerunner 265’s Training Readiness feature, since sleep history is one of the metrics Garmin notes it uses for calculating this score.
Buying the Latest Model
Choosing the right fitness tracker comes down to getting the features you need at the right price, so yes, we took price into consideration, too. You’re always deciding between price and features when you deal with tech, though. Just remember: In theory, you’ll be with your news smartwatch for a year or two, so it may not be a bad idea to purchase something a bit more cutting-edge, so you can get more mileage out of your device.
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