It is with a wee bit of sorrow that I bid my Fitbit One R.I.P. It has been a more or less faithful step tracking device for way too short a time (I don’t remember, but maybe a decade?). It was my second one, the first having died as well. My Fitbit dashboard says I’ve taken 17,071,785 steps since sometime in 2018, when I changed the account email address and managed to lose all my previous data.
The device you see in the photo isn’t actually dead. It apparently is still recording and syncing to my Fitbit dashboard, but the face of the device, which lives in my pocket, no longer shows the date, time, accumulated steps, distance (horizontal), or distance (vertical). Also, I have to recharge it every three or four days now — it used to be once a week. I figure eventually (soonish) it’ll stop taking any charge at all, and that’ll be that.
Fitbit discontinued offering the One model on their website and everything else they offer sucks. I got mine because it was inexpensive compared to the other models, and it measured more of what I wanted: altitude (in stories, presumably increments of 10′). It was simple with few features that I didn’t care about. All of the subsequent models Fitbit has put out since the One are jam-packed with useless crap. Well, maybe not useless, but definitely not interesting to me.
Really, all I want is a fancy pedometer that interfaces with an app that records what I’m doing. I don’t want a heart rate monitor, a sleep monitor, calorie recorder, or the ability to check my email. I don’t want anything on my wrist or around my neck. I want my One to last forever. But that’s not going to happen.
Or is it?
I went to Amazon and looked for pedometers with apps. Because of course that’s where to look for anything and everything. And guess what I found? Everything that is missing from the Fitbit website, even the very first model I used, called a Zip. Except the Zip they show and the One they show aren’t the same. The One, which I’ve always gotten for under $100 is priced at just under $400! Now it includes a sleep tracker and apparently an alarm that vibrates (no sound). I guess that makes it worth $300 more? Also, the model year is 2012 and I guess that’s because they’re either overstock from when Fitbit stopped offering them or because they’re actually Chinese knock-offs.
I’m not ordering a replacement yet. I’m hoping for a miracle. It’s just a minor irritation that I can’t see anything on the device itself, but if the point is to record steps and stories then the data is just a cell phone app away.
R.I.P. in this case stands for Recharge In Perpetuity. A girl can hope, can’t she.
