Fitbit Flex Review

Fitbit Flex is a fitness tracker from company Fitbit. Like all fitness trackers, it's designed to record what you're doing day-in day-out, and turn this into stats that you can use to help with your fitness and health.

Fitbit are a fairly new company, having only been founded in 2007. Similar to a lot of modern fitness and tech-based companies, they are from San Francisco, California. The company makes a number of different fitness products, which they separate into three ranges called Everyday, Active and Performance.

The Flex comes from their Everyday fitness products and is a slim stylish device. Unlike some similar products, the Flex is no bigger than a normal wristband and very comfortable to wear. It's designed for everyday users interested in tracking general fitness, rather than being for a specific sport or activity.

Inside the stylish packaging you find the Flex housed in a wristband. As well as that, you also get the Flex charger which plugs into a USB port on your computer, a Bluetooth adapter specific for the Flex, and a second wristband that is designed for smaller wrists.

Apart from that you get a small piece of paper telling you to go to fitbit.com/setup to set up your device. Simple!

Configuration of the device is very easy, and when you go to the link above it will get you to download the software for your PC or Mac and run the setup.

You can even keep it easy by signing up with a Facebook or Google account. Also don't forget to get your mobile involved - jump on your app store and get the Fitbit app for Android, Apple, or Windows.

The setup process will ask for your height, weight and age to allow it to make calculations of your exercise more accurate. The whole process took less than 15 minutes to setup my PC and phone.

Syncing your data from the device is all done over Bluetooth 4.0 which is very power efficient and will sync directly with the phone or via the USB dongle. The sync happens automatically whenever it can sense the device within its range. It works seamlessly and needed no involvement from me, which is how tech should be!

Once synchronised, your online or app dashboard is updated and you can see your progress.

The dashboard is fully customisable so you can get the data you want to see, or you can just leave it alone which means you haven't got hours of setup and tweaking.

Within the dashboard you can link with friends that have Fitbit and challenge each other, add other fitbit devices you might have, and log any food and water taken onboard. I did spend sometime setting up the dashboard to look how I wanted, with distance up the top and even had a weekly step challenge with a mate to see who could do more!

Having an account with MapMyRun, Fitbit allows the import and export of my data and it extends beyond this with other popular apps including Weight Watchers and My Fitness Pal.

For the fashion conscious, you can always head over to the fitbit store and get the colour wristband you want, from the 10 colours currently available (slate in my case).

Spending five days wearing the device, I almost forgot about it as it's so lightweight and comfortable.

As instructed I wore it on my left wrist, which allows the devices to get the most accurate reading for a right-hander.

Every night I put it into sleep mode, and in the morning was woken up by the silent alarm which makes the device vibrate. It's a much nicer way to wake up compared to my phone alarm (which I normally want to launch across the bedroom!).

Looking at the stats over the five days, I was surprised at quite how active I am. Most days I managed to get close to the 10,000 steps recommended. I'm not sure why you would want to, but for the cheaters out there, I did spot that you can fake the steps by shaking your wrist up and down to trick the device's accelerometers.

The big surprise was that the battery still had around 30% charge after the five days of use, despite it syncing with the wireless dongle and the phone on a regular basis. That compares well with the and Polar Loop (6 days), but the Garmin Vivofit battery doesn't need charging at all, instead being replaced every year or so like a normal watch battery.

The wristband controls are really simple to use, with a double-tap displaying up to five lights to show your progress for that day, and a continuous tap to put it in and out of sleep mode (which can also be activated by the mobile app).

Being intrigued about the accuracy of what might be seen as a fancy pedometer, I did some research and found Fitbit has a good track record. Tests done by Iowa State University had it down as one of the most accurate in the market.

So the device is good at what it is designed to do now, but if (like myself) you want more from a fitness tracker, then there are other products in the range.

The Charge HR and Surge launched in early 2015, which offer heart rate monitors, GPS tracking, music control, smart notification and caller ID.

All very impressive!

The flex is priced at £80 all but a penny, and for what you get along with all the online features it's a great price. The Nike FuelBand has similar functionality and retails at £90, and we've included a price comparison of other fitness bands on our Polar Loop review.

With the all singing and dancing Surge priced at a significantly higher £199, the Flex offers more than enough functionality for the average user and makes a great present option.

But for myself, I think I would probably replace my watch and have the Surge option.