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TECH NEWS
Fitbit Surge activity tracker with GPS now offers cycling features
Fitbit has updated its Surge fitness watch with cycling-specific features, using the on-board GPS and integrated heart rate sensor, to provide all the data you need to track and monitor your rides. Wrist-based activity trackers are booming in popularity, part of the emerging wearable tech market, with many focused on providing health benefits. The Surge will cost £199.99.
The Fitbit Surge packs a GPS sensor to providing routing, speed and distance metrics, and heart rate monitoring via an optical sensor on the base of the device. Fitbit offers a wide range of fitness bands, but few combine GPS and a HRM in this way, a few other examples of the growing choice include the TomTom Runner Cardio Watch and the Apple Watch.
The Surge now offers a 'bike' mode, and offers features like real-time bike stats including distance, duration, average speed, heart rate, calories burned. Sync the Surge to the app and you get another level of detail, including a map preview of route, distance, duration, average speed, heart rate, calories burned, active minutes and ride impact on daily stats. The Surge can also provide heart rate zones and track resting heart rate and monitors historical progress.
Fitbit claim the Surge provides seven days (168 hours) of battery life with heart rate and 5 hours with GPS. While 5 hours is more than enough for many cyclists, many will find that battery duration coming up well short for longer rides. The company says it is working to extend the GPS battery life. As it stands, it will be a limiting factor for some people.
The on-board sensors provide all the usual sort of data useful to a cyclist, including distance, duration, average speed, heart rate, calories burned and the time. The Surge syncs to an app on a compatible smartphone so you can review your ride in more detail. The compatible app will provide further detailed information for route planning and tracking.
"Our users are passionate about fitness and have consistently requested a way to track their outdoor cycling activity. We are delivering this feature on Fitbit Surge for active consumers looking to track and better understand performance during rides, in addition to their other workouts,” said Tim Roberts, VP of Interactive, Fitbit. “Our goal is to provide users with the tools it takes to track their exercise and reward them for doing the activities they love to do most – like biking and running."
The Surge costs £199.99 and is available now. More at www.fitbit.com/uk
David worked on the road.cc tech team from 2012-2020. Previously he was editor of Bikemagic.com and before that staff writer at RCUK. He's a seasoned cyclist of all disciplines, from road to mountain biking, touring to cyclo-cross, he only wishes he had time to ride them all. He's mildly competitive, though he'll never admit it, and is a frequent road racer but is too lazy to do really well. He currently resides in the Cotswolds, and you can now find him over on his own YouTube channel David Arthur - Just Ride Bikes.
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12 comments
The fitbit has been shown to be highly inaccurate and it syncs to yet another app. Apple watch with strava, maps, heart rate, and apps will have far more capability.
I'd be interested to see if the Surge stops counting steps whilst in cycling mode.
That's the one thing that annoyed me the most about my Garmin VivoFit. The start of a ride I'd be on ~4k steps, and once I got back I'd be on ~6k.
If Garmin were clever, they'd have maid it connect to my GSC10. Even if it didn't record... at least it would know I was on my bike, and stop counting steps.
Where's the ANT+ support? It would be quite attractive to cyclists with this IMHO.
How does it manage 168 hours of battery life for heart rate monitoring where the Mio Link and Scosche Rythm+ have around 7?
Because HR-monitoring is done optically using sensors on the back of the watch so no wireless comms stuff needed for an ANT+/BTLE sensor etc.?
But broadcasting on ANT+ presumably uses very little power as Garmin cadence sensors etc batteries last for months/years.
The Mio and Scosche also use optical sensors for HRM and it's those I thought really sucked power?
Can't see anything that suggests it supports ANT+, so, fail right there. Don't know many 'cycling specific' devices which fail to offer at least speed/cadence compatibility, let alone power (has Bluetooth but says nothing about sensors).
and I can't say I even notice my HR strap being on, perhaps that's just me.
So aside from the flashy screen (which I'll wait 3 or 4 years to start appearing on the bottom end devices) I'll stick with my trusty and cheap (and 15 hour battery life with GPS on) Bryton for now.
p.s. fitbit, your flashy site doesn't work properly on chrome either.
This article is load of old rubbish. There is nothing new in it regarding cycling enhancements over what the device did on its initial launch.
What are the 'cycling specific features'? My washing machine has more cycling specific feature than this!!
No, it didn't have any cycling modes at launch. As always for GPS stuff, the dcrainmaker review is worth reading
http://www.dcrainmaker.com/2015/01/fitbit-surge-depth-review.html
Hi Bikebot, So what are the bike features? Please can you list them? I can't see any in the article.
They've added cycling as an activity type, that's it. That should mean for those using it to record calories out, (activity tracking being the core fitbit market), it'll now calculate them for cycling and list them as such in the users diary. The lack of such a mode at launch was a glaring omission and received a lot of comment, which is probably why their PR have made a bit of a fuss about this.
Fitbit were also making quite a fuss about their integration with Strava (less so about them definitely not integrating with Apple Healthkit). I would hope they've now done that for cycling as well as running, but I'd wait for feedback to see if they've actually done that and how well it works.
Personally, I'm disappointed with it. I use a Polar M400 which is a good basic sports watch for running and cycling, and is also a step/activity tracker for the rest of the day. The Fitbit was trying to be something similar, but with more "smartwatch" features and it and removed the need for a HRM strap. Unfortunately, they seem to have missed the mark in implementation, but it's worth keeping an eye on to see how it improves with firmware updates.
o dear