Fitbit is the leader in the wearables space. They seem to be the only one actually able to sell their products, and they refreshed their entire line of trackers this year with the Fitbit Blaze, Alta, Charge 2 and Flex 2. The Fitbit Blaze is their answer to the surging smartwatch market. While it doesn’t run on Android Wear, or Samsung’s Tizen platform, Fitbit does want it to replace those devices. With the latest update, it appears to be able to do just that.
The Fitbit Blaze is a new addition to the lineup that debuted earlier this year. It retails for $199, and offers a slew of features. One of the features that has a mixed reaction, are the hourly alerts to move. Fitbit wants you to walk about 250 steps each hour throughout the day. That’s about two and a half minutes of walking, so it’s not much. It’s a feature that debuted on the Fitbit Blaze and Alta and has since come to the rest of their lineup. Now the Blaze is getting a brand new update, which brings support for third-party notifications. Which was arguably one of the Blaze’s major omissions. Now you are able to select which apps can send notifications to your wrist. Of course the most common ones would be Gmail, Twitter and Facebook. But it’s great that you can select which apps you want to send you notifications, instead of just having all of them send them. On the topic of notifications, this update also properly displays emojis. In the past, it would simply display a white box.
That’s not all in this update though. Fitbit also brought 5 new watch faces to the Fitbit Blaze. Giving users even more choices for their watch face on the Blaze. Unfortunately, you still are unable to create your own watch faces or download them from another source to put on your Fitbit Blaze. Perhaps that is something that Fitbit will add in a future update, however. If you own the Blaze, simply sync your tracker with your smartphone and it should prompt you to download the latest firmware for your device.
Buy the Fitbit Blaze