The Fitbit Charge 6 Does the Basics, but That's Pretty Much It
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The Good
- Simple interface
- Informative app
- Cheaper than most fitness watches
- Adequate heart rate and GPS accuracy
The Bad- Music and payment require your phone to be nearby
- Music controls only available if you subscribe to YouTube
- “Maps” feature only provides directions, and not during activities
- GPS uses your phone by default, and can get messed up
Table of Contents
There are a lot of amazing smartwatches and fitness watches out there, but sometimes you just want a simple device that can do the basics. The Fitbit Charge 6 is a solid option. It can count your steps and track activities, and you don’t have to navigate through a ton of menus to operate the watch—just a few swipes and you’ll find the features you need.
Beyond the basics, though, you may run into some rough spots. The music controls only work if you subscribe to YouTube Music. The maps require your phone to be nearby. The Fitbit app is decently full-featured (it’s the same one that Pixel Watches use) but some features are paywalled and some are confusing or inconsistent.
Overall, the Fitbit Charge 6 does well for its price point, but if you want more than a minimalist approach, you might find yourself longing for a proper fitness watch, like an Apple Watch, a Pixel, or a Garmin.
Comfort and appearance
The Charge 6 comes in a “band” form factor, rather than trying to look like a watch. The device and its silicone strap are both 23 millimeters wide, with the screen shaped like a tall rectangle within the band. When it’s showing the time, the hour and minute numbers stack vertically on top of each other.
The fit is a bit strange, with a gap at the side of my wrist, even though the sensor at the back of the device makes good contact with my skin. It almost feels like it’s too tight and too loose at the same time. But once I got used to the feeling, it was fine.
The Charge 6 comes with two band sizes. With 6-inch wrists, I used the smaller one. Between the two, Google says that the bands will fit people with wrists from 5.1 inches to 8.3 inches. If you don’t like the sleek, one-piece look, there are plenty of third-party bands out there (try these braided elastic ones or this leather one).
Switching bands may also help with the skin irritation some Fitbit users report; it’s easy for sweat and moisture to build up underneath a silicone band and bother your skin. In general, you should wear any watch or band loosely enough that it can move back and forth on your wrist during daily wear. (Tighten it for workouts—just don’t tighten it too much, as I’ll discuss in the accuracy section below.)
One more thing about the physical appearance of the watch: Fitbits have gone back and forth on whether they have an actual, physical button on the side. The Charge 6 splits the middle with a “haptic” button, a bump (not a button) that buzzes when you touch it. Usually.
Navigating around the watch
Using the Fitbit Charge 6 is pretty easy. From the main watch face:
Swipe left to access your activities, such as when you want to start a run or a yoga session.
Swipe up to see a summary of your stats for the day—steps, calories, distance, “zone minutes,” the date, and your battery percentage. Keep swiping to see more detailed stats, like your sleep score and how many days this week you’ve exercised.
Swipe down for Google Wallet and settings. This is also where you can broadcast your heart rate to gym equipment.
Swipe right for music, maps, ECG, EDA, and timers and alarms. This menu loops around to include activities—same as if you had swiped left—and brings you back to the watch face.
The Charge 6 can also display notifications from your phone, but the narrow screen means that there’s only a word or two on each line.
Everything basically works fine, but there’s some flakiness that got on my nerves. The haptic button is supposed to always bring you back to the home screen, but sometimes I have to try a few times to get the button touch to register. The maps and music apps have also been unreliable for me, and have some design limitations that make them less useful than they’d seem—but more on that below.
Battery life and charging
The battery on the Fitbit Charge 6 lasted five to six days for me, which included about an hour of activity tracking most days. I did not use the always-on display. (Google says the battery can last “up to seven days.”)
It takes about two hours to charge, so you’ll want to put your Charge 6 on its charger once or twice a week. The charging cable is magnetic, and has a regular USB connector on the other end. (I used my own USB-C adapter to plug it into my laptop.) There’s a little round button on the charger, which will come in handy if you ever need to do a hard reset.
Heart rate and GPS accuracy
A fitness tracker should be able to measure your heart rate with reasonable accuracy and it should have good enough GPS accuracy to be able to track the distance you travel on walks, runs, or bike rides. The Fitbit Charge 6 isn’t a standout in either category, but it does both adequately.
When it comes to heart rate, the Fitbit is basically fine. I tested it against a chest strap, as I always do. Really good wrist-based wearables, like Garmin and Coros watches, tend to follow the chest strap closely, with only minor differences. The Fitbit Charge 6 didn’t rise to that level of quality, but it still kept pace approximately with the chest strap. The graph here shows my chest strap for reference in black, and the Fitbit in aqua. Not the best sensor out there, but certainly does the job for casual exercise.
The GPS also does fine, with some major asterisks. One is that it’s not actually using its own GPS most of the time. The Fitbit Charge 6 seems to think of its GPS chipset as a backup that it can use when it’s out of range of your phone. When your phone is in range, the Fitbit just copies its answers. You'll have to go to your GPS settings on the watch to change that. (The default is "dynamic," switching between itself and your phone as needed.)
So your GPS accuracy really depends on how accurate your phone is. Most phones are good enough for approximate tracking of your location (and thus pace and distance), but neither your phone nor the Fitbit are going to match the accuracy of, say, a nice Garmin.
The other asterisk on the Fitbit's GPS is that it’s possible to pull the strap so tight that you mess with the GPS antenna. I didn’t manage to trigger this effect with normal use, even pulling the strap nice and snug during most of my runs. But one time, just to test the rumor, I wore the strap really, uncomfortably tight, and look at what happened to my GPS track:
As long as you keep your phone with you, or make sure your Fitbit’s strap isn’t too tight, this shouldn’t be an issue. But it is an edge case worth being aware of.
App experience
The Fitbit app is organized well enough to show you the major numbers you care about at a glance. You can configure it to focus on heart health, building fitness, improving your sleep, or managing your weight, to give a few examples. You can choose to show or hide many of the individual metrics.
You access all of your data from the “Today” screen in the app, a design choice that must have been intended to simplify things, but really just makes them more confusing—I’m always wondering, “where the heck did they put the thing I’m looking for?”
For example, if I want to see the last time I went for a run, I have to swipe back to find a day I ran, and then tap on that run. There’s no way to explore all of your running data together.
Fitbit also hides some of its data behind a “Premium” subscription ($9.99/month). Notably, most of your sleep data is in this category. Without Premium, you only get a sleep score, not a detailed breakdown of how you slept. The same is true of details on your stress.
Google has sometimes moved features across the paywall. The daily readiness score used to be a Premium perk; now, everybody has access. Most of what you’re paying for with Premium is the workout library (plus recipes and meditation sessions). So if you’re just interested in the data that the Charge 6 collects, a free account will still cover the basics.
Music and other extras
The Fitbit Charge 6 has features that go beyond basic timekeeping and activity tracking, but caveats apply.
Google Wallet and ECG
Google Wallet and the ECG (electrocardiogram) scan both work pretty much as advertised. To use Google Wallet, you connect a payment card, and can then tap your Fitbit to pay for purchases. The ECG app has you click through a bunch of disclaimers, and then you can do a 30-second reading (touching your thumb and finger to the metal sides of the device) to see if you have a “normal sinus rhythm” or not.
EDA (stress/mindfulness)
There is also an EDA scan, which claims to be able to tell how stressed you are. (EDA stands for electrodermal activity, which includes how much your skin is sweating.) To measure it, you hold the sides of your Fitbit for three minutes, which it counts as a mindfulness session, and tells you how many “responses” you had during that session. For me, just now, that number was 20. I’ve read everything I can about what this feature is supposed to do for you, and I still don’t see the point.
Music
Music could be a nice feature on the Charge 6, but it has a major downside: you need to subscribe to YouTube Music ($13.99/month gets you YouTube Premium and YouTube Music) to use the feature. Spotify isn’t an option, and neither is just controlling whatever is playing on your phone—something most other fitness watches can do just fine.
And, yes, this means that the music is playing from your phone, not from the Fitbit itself. So you can’t leave your phone at home while you go for a run and still expect to listen to music. And at that point, why bother using the on-wrist controls at all? Just use your phone or the playback controls on your headphones. I am a YouTube Music subscriber and even I don’t find myself reaching for the music controls on the Fitbit.
Maps
There’s also a Google Maps feature, which requires Google Maps to be open on your phone at the same time. It can give you turn-by-turn directions, which sounds like it would be helpful when you’re out running or cycling.
But you can’t navigate while you’re tracking an activity, nor can you see a map (the tiny screen only tells you your next turn), so again the usefulness is limited.
This feature and music are both often unreliable for me as well. I sometimes get a message that the Fitbit can’t connect to my phone, even when my phone is in my hand and the Fitbit app is displaying a “Connected to Fitbit” message. I went through all the official troubleshooting steps and was about to give up, when I found a suggestion from a Reddit comment to check the notification permissions within the Fitbit app. I still haven’t figured out why Music won’t connect.
The Fitbit Charge 6’s perks and extra features are often disappointing, but its core functionality delivers exactly what it says it does. You can wear your Charge 6 and track your steps, log activities, find out how much time you spent in active “zone minutes,” and more. It tracks your sleep and displays your data in a nice, neat app.
I’m mildly disappointed by a few things. The heart rate and GPS tracking are only OK, with the GPS piggybacking off your phone unless you change that in settings. The music feature isn’t really a music feature at all, just a (for me, unreliable) duplication of your phone’s YouTube Music controls, and then only for subscribers.
For these disappointments and the flakiness I encountered (like the button not always registering presses and the Fitbit sometimes thinking the phone wasn’t connected) I can’t give it full marks. But if you want something that does the basics and is substantially less expensive than most fitness watches, the Fitbit Charge 6 fits the bill.
