I actually made one of my first youtube videos about the versa as well, but a lot has happened since and today we are going to have a look at the fitbit versa 3, which is the latest version of the popular verse of smartwatches. It costs 230 euros or dollars, and it has a built in gps, loads of useful health and fitness features and a great battery life, so let’s get into it. Music, the fitbit versa. 3. Has this square curl shaped aluminum case, which is neither fully square nor it is circle, but somewhere between the two? The watch is quite thick, but it only weighs in at around 41 grams, so it’s lightweight enough for all they use. The bands are soft and they are easily swappable in case you need a different, color or design from time to time. The one thing i don’t like about this infinity band design is the way you have to fasten it. Since i have a hairy forearm putting on the watch could be a bit uncomfortable, but as soon as it’s on it’s comfortable to wear all day long and even at night. During sleeping the screen is an amoled screen which means vivid, bright, colors and deep blacks. It’S easy enough to read even outside in direct sunlight, and it has an always on mode as well. Turning it on will impact the battery life, but i would highly recommend using it, especially during an activity. The touchscreen works well for the most part, but i had some problems with it.
It does not always register touches as well as it should and going through. The menus can be a bit laggy. Sometimes my biggest gripe with the watch, however, is not the touchscreen, but this haptic button on the side fitbit decided to give up the actual buttons for this haptic nightmare thingy in order to improve the water resistance of the watch, but it wasn’t their best move. The new button is awkward to access and annoying to use, so i only hope that fitbit will bring back the physical buttons in its next generation. The button has multiple functions. One is waking up the screen which you can avoid by tapping three times on the screen itself. But if you want to use the shortcut function, you will have no choice but to use the button one long press will bring up one selected function, which is the music player in my case, but it’s customizable too, and the quick double tap will give you four Further apps or functions to choose from this helps with controlling the watch, but, for example, i could not use the timer during an exercise, even though i set it to be one of the shortcuts, because the watch simply forced me to choose between the two. So it will quit and stop whatever exercise. You are tracking in order to start a simple, timer or stopwatch another kind of a shortcut or quick menu is available. If you swipe to the right on the home screen, you can enable and disable different modes like sleep mode, do not disturb mode and the always on display mode.
You can also set the brightness of the screen here. If you swipe down on the home screen, it will reveal your notifications and if you swipe up, you will get into your widgets. The weather, core stats, advanced stats and relax. Widgets are customizable to an extent, but if you tap any of them to bring up the more detailed view, it will take ages for the app to load yeah. It takes a while doesn’t it on to one of my favorite things about the fitbit versa. 3. Let’S talk about the excellent battery life fitbit claims that the watch has a battery life of more than 6 days, and i can confirm that indeed, it does. With an average of 3 4 exercises a week, including two runs using the gps. I was able to get the watch running for seven days straight with one charge with continuous gps use. The watch will last for about 12 hours and if you ever run out of juice, the fast charging will give you one full day of use. In only 12 minutes, oh and i like the magnetic charger a lot as well. All in all fitbit did a great job. With the battery now let’s see the hat matrix available on the fitbit versa. 3.. There is plenty of useful data the watch will collect mostly at night when you are sleeping, there is breathing rate, heart rate, variability, skin temperature, variation, blood, oxygen, saturation and resting heart rate as well.
You can see weekly and monthly trends and graphs and that’s all nice to have, but as of this review, fitbit kind of pushes you to subscribe to their premium membership. If you want to have access to all of this data, there is a 90 day free trial period, but then it costs like 9 euro a month or 8 euros a year. I have mixed feelings about that, but, as far as i know, it’s going to change in the near future as fitbit plans to make all the premium health matrix available to all users for free, so that’s a step into the right direction. But again, as of now, it’s still a premium feature, but let’s see what other features we get for starters, there is the track, your mindfulness feature, which has loads of meditation and breeding exercises to follow, most of which are available for premium members only and you can Set up different goals and it tracks your specific mindfulness practices if that’s something you want to do next, there are different guided programs. These are not only training related, but you can choose some diet or sleep focus programs as well. Most of them are premium, but a few is available for free. You can sign up for different challenges and virtual adventures too, which can be a fun way of achieving certain goals, such as 62 500 steps in 24 hours. You can invite friends and do all those things together virtually so there is a community aspect to it as well, and last but not least, there are premium workout programs of every sort body, weight, dumbbell, core cardio, yoga, martial arts and a lot of other workouts are Available with full length follow along type videos, but now let’s see what the watch can do without the premium membership.
It has all the features, exercise, profiles and sensors. Every fitness tracker should have. You can track your steps, your calories and how many floors you climbed, or how many hours you were active during the day, but you can log your food and water intake as well. If you want, you will get personalized notifications and reminders to move during the day. According to your goals, you can select from plenty of exercises, including running weight, training, spinning cycling, golf martial arts, pilates or poor swimming just to name a few. You can set up what data you can see on screen during a workout or whether you want to use the gps or not, and you can choose to have the display on all the time. The biggest improvement over the previous versions is that now you have a gps built into the watch, meaning that you don’t have to rely on your phone anymore when it comes to tracking your workouts and activities outside the satellite tracking is accurate and reliable enough. I compared it to different garmin watches, including my 4745, and the versa 3 delivered consistently good results with a different of less than one to two percent in total distance. The only place where the versa tree couldn’t keep up with the much more expensive garmin watch was the running track. As you can see, the 745 is very precise, thanks to its special calibrated track round profile, so it’s not even a fair comparison, but other than that.
The versa 3 delivered great gps tracking results. The heart rate monitor is a different story, though there is a brand new heart rate monitor in the fitbit versa, 3, and it seems to be having some issues. The heart rate data is anything but consistent or reliable, especially during an activity let’s see running. For example, here you can see a massive difference between the two graphs. The purple is the data from my hrm chest trap and the green is the versa tree. It’S off by more than 30 beats per minute, sometimes which makes it useless for any serious heart rate based training on the other day during a short track run, it delivered some reasonably close results, but again, during another run, there was this huge gap compared to the Reference values and what’s even worse, is that you cannot connect the versa tree to any external heart rate sensor, so there is no way to get more precise and more accurate data, but i feel like it’s time to say something nice about the watch too. So i found the versa 3 one of the most accurate, if not the most accurate watch, i’ve used as far as sleep tracking goes, and it does not only tracks your nighttime activities pretty well, but the fitbit app displays all your data in a very informative and Visually pleasing manner, you get to see your detailed data, including deep sleep and ram phases, and you will also get a sleep score every single night, which pretty much reflects the way i wake up in the morning.
If it says my sleep was only fair, i feel tired, but if it says my sleep was excellent, which barely ever happens by the way, then i feel energized and ready to start my day. The watch can even help you to improve your sleep by warning you when you need to go to bed and telling you what you should or should not do to have a good night’s sleep and in the morning you can set up the watch to wake you Up when you are in a lighter sleep stage, which can help with the always painful process of getting out of bed, quite a handy and complex feature as a contrast to that let’s see the oxygen saturation monitoring. As long as you have the special spo2 clock face on, you will get a blood oxygen saturation reading every night, or at least you are supposed to get one, because i found that it did not actually take a reading. Every night i was wearing the watch and for whatever reason, i could never even see my spo2 data in the app as the app kept asking me to install the spo2 clock face. Even though i was already using the required clock face all the time. Fitbit should do something about it, but i heard that they will make spo2 readings available without having to use the special clock face in the future. So there is some hope for a software update and since i mentioned future software updates let’s talk about two features which are in the spec list, but not available.
Yet one is taking phone calls with the watch and the other is the use of google assistant. The versa 3 has a built in microphone and a speaker which, right now, you can use with amazon alexa only but it’s promised to get an update at some point in the future, which will add phone call, integration and google assistant to the feature list as well. But again, these are not available as of this review, but there are still plenty other smart features on the fitbit versa: 3. Smart notifications, downloadable, apps and custom clock faces. For example, you can use your watch for contactless payments as long as your bank supports fitbit pay. Of course my bank does not support it. So i’m. Out of luck here, music playback is good to have but it’s limited to downloadable, playlists and podcast from deezer. You can only control spotify from the watch, but you cannot store and play music from spotify on the watch itself. You cannot upload your own mp3s to the watch anymore either. So, as you can see, the fitbit versa. 3 has plenty old features, loads of new features and a few features which are not even working yet. Unfortunately, almost all features and functions have their little quirks, which makes everyday use a little less joyful. The laggy menu system, the awkward haptic button and the unreliable heart rate and spo2 readings are the ones i found the most annoying. Some of them might be fixed with the new software, but most of them are hardware issues, so there is not much that can be done, but to finish off this review on a more positive note, i have to mention the great amoled screen, the upgraded user interface.
The excellent battery life and the magnetic charger there is tons of health and exercise related data you can get from using the watch, even though some of it is only available with a premium account, but that’s promised to change soon and my favorite is the sleep tracking Feature which is one of the best i’ve ever used, the smartphone app is also one of the highlights of the fitbit experience with its easy to use user interface and more than enough features. In short, the fitbit versa. 3 is a mixed bag, but there is a lot you can love about this watch. If you need a decent hat and fitness tracker with a battery that can last for a week or even longer, then the fitbit versa 3 might be the right choice for you. So that’s it for today, if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel.K0sYjT3ata8
