Fitbit Luxe

amazon Fitbit Luxe reviews

Fitbit is a well-known brand for fitness trackers, but in the last few years, the company has produced products that are somewhat “ugly” in design and experience. Fortunately, this has been changed with the all-new Fitbit Luxe.

Although provided with some new features in terms of features, Fitbit Luxe is oriented to bring a more personal style to users, especially women. It’s the first Fitbit fitness tracker to use an AMOLED display, plus the stainless steel case and fashion make it something you might just want to wear over and over again!

Key information about Fitbit Luxe

0.76 inch AMOLED screen 124×206 pixels & density 326 PPI

Heart Rate Monitor / SpO2

Stainless steel case: white/black / orchid

GPS

Stress tracking

Sleep tracking

HRV, skin surface temperature, respiratory rate

Sports tracking mode

Price at time of review: $149.95 (compare: Inspire 2 for $99, Charge 4 for $149.95, plus a special Luxe Edition for $199.99)

Fitbit Luxe: Design and Display

The Luxe has a 36mm outer case, a bit smaller than the Inspire 2. But in return, the case material is stainless steel rather than plastic, and the AMOLED screen is more colorful and sharper.

The panel has a resolution of 124×206 pixels with a density of 326 PPI, the display itself is housed in a glass panel, so the viewing area is quite smaller than it looks. The above resolution is not high and not too bright. However, this is still a big step up for Fitbit when compared to the dull monochrome screen on the Charge 4 and Inspire 2.

The small screen makes it a bit difficult to use even with slender, dexterous fingers, especially when there are no physical buttons. My wife found the UX a bit difficult to use and navigate. She complimented it for being very light and extremely comfortable to wear. We’d say it’s the best-looking tracker Fitbit has made so far.

The screen isn’t always on (Always-on), so you’ll need to tap the screen, or raise your wrist to get it to light up, and it’s responsive and smooth. The screen automatically adjusts the brightness based on the ambient light, which can be understood as a way to save more battery.

Like a lot of AMOLED screens, the display’s visibility isn’t great in bright outdoor lighting, but it felt good enough for us.

Fitbit is offering a range of additional strap accessories to give the Luxe a more fashionable look. The more expensive Fitbit Luxe Special Edition doesn’t use a silicone strap but instead has a gold-plated stainless steel strap.

Fitbit has equipped it with 5ATM water resistance, it still “survived” our swimming sessions in the pool, and wore it in the shower.

Fitness tracker

Inside this slim body, there’s nothing groundbreaking here or something we’ve never seen fitted on a Fitbit tracker before.

There’s a fairly standard 3-axis accelerometer, which is used to track steps, and indoor exercise activities, and also enables automatic sleep tracking. There’s an optical heart rate monitor for continuous heart rate monitoring, heart rate during exercise, and features like Active Zone Minutes, which encourage wearers to focus on achieving target heart rate zone levels spend regularly. You can also generate heart rate data during sleep monitoring here.

Finally, you will get red and infrared sensors to provide blood oxygen readings. While you can’t get spot-on readings on the screen like some other trackers and watches offer, Fitbit focuses on using sensors to show you nightly averages and see trends in your data companion Fitbit app.

When you swipe down from the home screen, you’ll find a list of daily stats, showing steps, distance traveled, calories burned, and active minutes. There’s no altimeter here, so you won’t be able to see elevation data like you can on the Charge 4. Swipe further and you can see your current heart rate, recording most recently recorded exercise and sleep, including Sleep Score.

While most trackers use the same motion sensor to track movement, they all use their software algorithms to collect that motion data. It’s nice to see that both the trackers we tested and compared provide similar data on most days. The deviation from Garmin is only about 100 steps.

The smartwatch-inspired UI works well so we can quickly see the latest stats, and can display individual metrics with a simple tap on the screen.

This is one of the most comfortable trackers we’ve ever used while sleeping. Once the accelerometer-based tracking has done its job, head into the Fitbit app to dig deeper into the stats.

That’s where you’ll find sleep scores, sleep duration, sleep phase breakdown, breathing rate, and sleep heart rate-based recovery insights. This is also where you can find your estimated oxygen change, providing you with estimated SpO2 readings to help you better understand your current health and fitness level.

As for sleep stats, we’ve always rated Fitbit as providing some of the most reliable data, and that hasn’t changed with the Luxe. Overall, it gave a more reliable overall picture of our sleep time than Garmin’s sleep tracker, which tends to overreport by about an hour.

Fitbit is now offering ways to help you enjoy a more comfortable sleep, pointing you in the direction of meditation or doing some deep breathing exercises that you can access from your device and apps.

As we said, there’s nothing groundbreaking here, but the Luxe delivers those great tracking basics in a package that makes interactions much more enjoyable than other fitness trackers of the firm. Make the Luxe a useful device to track your steps, and sleep and give you the push to keep moving throughout the day.

Health tracking

Continuously monitoring your heart rate is a simple way to gain insight into your health. For us, we found that resting heart rate data compared to the Garmin resting heart rate monitor and chest strap monitor reported a difference of 5-6 bpm at times. Real-time heart rate data tends to differ by 2-3 bpm from chest monitors.

On the tracker, you’ll have Relaxed and Guided breaths, which are simple two-minute sessions to feel the breath, which emits small tactile vibrations to indicate movement from inhalation and expiratory.

You can find Fitbit’s psychotherapy sessions on the phone app, which essentially listens to meditation sessions, but require a Fitbit Premium subscription to get full access.

You can also track stress through Reflections and generate stress scores. Reflection is simply recording how you are feeling that day on a scale from very calm to very tense.

Then you have the Stress Score, which is a bit like the Sleep Score and is generated by a bunch of data that combine to give you the score. Indeed, it will take that score from what it calls Responsiveness, Exercise Balance, and Sleep Patterns.

Responsiveness is essentially tied to heart rate data. Includes heart rate variability measurements taken during sleep, elevated heart rate from the previous day, and heart rate during sleep. Exertion scores are based on daily steps, weekly activity level, and fitness level versus workout fatigue. The sleep pattern scores are based on total sleep over the past week, restlessness, and time spent in REM and deep sleep.

Responsiveness and sleep patterns are scored at 30, and exertion balance is at 40. Combine all three for a score of 100. If you’re close to 100, you’re showing very little signs of mental stress physical. We just want to tell you that these stress scores should only be viewed as a reference, not taken too seriously. But it’s also good that Fitbit is turning more attention than before on its ability to track and manage stress, and we’d love to see how these features evolve.

It’s no surprise that the Luxe lacks some of the more advanced health features we’ve seen on Sense smartwatches, like an ECG sensor and the ability to monitor skin surface temperature.

where can you get a Fitbit Luxe online

Fitbit Luxe Fitness and Wellness Tracker with Stress Management, Sleep Tracking and 24/7 Heart Rate, Black/Graphite, One Size (S & L Bands Included): Buy it now

Fitbit Luxe Woven Accessory Band in Slate, Official Fitbit Product, Small: Buy it now

Fitbit Luxe Fitness and Wellness Tracker with Stress Management (Renewed): Buy it now

Sports tracking

Luxe can track your exercise time, but there will be some limitations on what it can do given the slim size of the device!

On the screen, you can swipe right to reveal the exercise features. From here, you can start tracking walking, running (indoor and outdoor), cycling, swimming in the pool, and joint workouts. There’s also the option to sync other exercise modes from the companion app. Fitbit’s SmartTrack automatic activity recognition support is also included for exercise tracking when it recognizes you’re working out.

When running, you can choose to track using the accelerometer or choose a more precise tracking option using connected GPS (using your phone’s GPS). We have to launch the phone app to make the connection, which usually takes around 20-30 seconds at most. Before you start, you can toggle goal settings based on Zone Minutes, distance, time, or calories. You can also set up auto-run detection and auto-pause features.

Once moved, you can see three columns of data, and the middle column can be clicked to see through metrics like average tempo, time, tempo, and heart rate. The distance covered by the top indicator display is a bit small, which makes you squint a little to see it on the go. In terms of accuracy, compared with the Garmin Enduro for GPS distance tracking, we found that the average speed was slower, and the average heart rate reading was about 5 bpm higher.

Moving on to swimming, you can choose goals that are familiar to you, adjust the length of the pool, and change distance units measured in meters or yards. In this swimming mode, the screen will be locked, and need to double-tap the screen to unlock it again.

You will need to wait until the swim is over and the data is synced to see your tracked length and distance covered. The difference we recorded is about 250-350 meters compared to the Forerunner 55 swim tracking and Google’s Form Swim swim goggles.

We also use it for indoor rowing sessions and home workouts, with heart rate tracking vital exercise data collected. We’ve found that it generally delivers around 5-6 bpm higher maximum heart rate readings than the chest strap, and there are also some oddities in the data.

Luxe doesn’t change our minds about how we rate Fitbit devices when it comes to fitness tracking. Overall, it has competition in aspects like distance and heart rate tracking. Especially if you care a lot about your fitness data.

Smart features

Like all Fitbit wearables, the Luxe also has some smartwatch features. While you won’t find NFC contactless payments, or the ability to download apps or music players here, the device allows you to view notifications from your phone, set up sleep mode to mute notifications, and use timers and smartwatches.

It works with Android phones and iPhones. It also offers a user interface we’ve never seen on Fitbit fitness trackers before. Swipe right and you can see menus to set a timer, alarm, and view notifications.

Swiping down from the screen you access settings like turn on do not disturb mode, adjust the screen brightness, change “wake up” settings, and screen timeout. You can also turn off heart rate monitoring to help extend battery life.

An important feature of smartwatches is support for notifications, it’s always been a challenge to make notifications so easy to see and interact with on such a small screen. You can see the sender’s name and the first few words of the message – but it’s hardly a substitute for the full smartwatch experience.

You can view messages, scheduled events, email, and app notifications. Quick reply templates can be used to respond to app notifications, which you can customize for each app they are supported for.

Battery life

Fitbit rarely offers the level of battery capacity built into its devices, with Luxe claiming the device can give up to 5 days of battery life. Slightly shorter than the 7 days of the Charge 4, and more than the expected 6 days of the Sense and Versa 3 smartwatches also from Fitbit. 5 days is also half that of the Inspire 2, which currently offers the best battery life on Fitbit devices you can buy at the moment.

Talking about charging, from 0% will take 2 hours to reach 100%. When we tried tracking 30 minutes of running outdoors, we saw a 5% drop in battery. You can turn off features like heart rate monitoring, control the number of notifications displayed, and adjust screen brightness. That will probably get you 1 or 2 extra days of use, but 5 days is too much for the Fitbit Luxe in our opinion.