Fitbit Charge 6 review: The best fitness tracker

As the name suggests, the Fitbit Charge 6 is the latest in a long line of the Charge activity trackers from the brand. It means that this is a very polished product even if there’s not much new here but the addition of better Google integration means it’s the best Fitbit activity tracker yet.

With a slim and subtle design, great battery life, accurate health tracking, and compatibility with Android and iPhone, this is a very accomplished fitness band at a competitive price. Its simplicity is a breath of fresh air compared to over-complicated smartwatches.

• Slim and comfortable
• Two band sizes in box
• Touchscreen and haptic side button

Simple activity trackers used to be two-a-penny but now decent new ones are harder to find than expensive smartwatches. Luckily the Fitbit Charge 6 harks back to the pleasingly straightforward idea of a bracelet style fitness device that you can wear on its own as a watch or on your other wrist to complement a mechanical watch.

Our all black review sample looks very similar to the older Charge 5 but is very subtle and you can also get it in silver with a white band or rose gold with a coral band. The tracker comes with a small and large size band in the box to fit any wrist and we found it light and comfortable to wear all day long. The bands are interchangeable and you can buy several different styles from Fitbit.

There’s a small colour touch screen to cycle through your stats, settings, apps and to simply look at the time while there’s also a touch sensitive button on the left hand side to skip back to the home screen or to call up things like your payment card. It’s a static button that gives haptic vibrating feedback when you push it.

The screen is tiny so notifications are very small, cramped, and hard to read, but there is a new magnify feature where you can triple tap on the screen to zoom in. On the underside that sits next to your skin is a heart rate sensor that can continually track your heart beat all day and night. The metal sides of the tracker are conductive and can be used to record an electrocardiogram (ECG) to further monitor your heart health.

It’s a very simple design to the point of being plain, but we found that part of its charm after using several bigger, heavy smartwatches.

• Built-in GPS
• Great heart rate monitor
• Subscription needed for full use

Fitbits were always designed to be smart pedometers, something the Charge 6 still accomplishes accurately, counting your steps, floors climbed, distance walked, and other stats simply by wearing it throughout the day. Unlike cheaper trackers, the Charge 6 has built-in GPS, which means you can go for a walk, run or cycle outside without your phone and track your route to be viewed later on a map in the Fitbit app.

We found this pretty accurate though if you want absolute precision you’re going to have to spend more on a specialist running watch from a brand like Garmin. However for casual walkers and runners it’s perfect, plus the heart rate monitoring is very accurate, so you get a pretty complete picture of your daily health habits.

It’s also great to see ECG built in along with irregular heart rhythm notifications. This is a feature usually found on more expensive wearables – ditto with the electrodermal sensor that measures changes in skin temperature to records changes in your mood and stress levels. It’s an impressively feature-packed device that can even monitor your blood oxygen levels, but it lacks the intelligent fall detection you’ll find on the Apple Watch or the Google Pixel Watch 2.

One of the most useful things the Fitbit app gives you is a daily readiness score which collates all of your health data from the Charge 6 and tells you how ready you are to tackle the day in terms of exercise. Annoyingly, this is hidden behind a paywall – Fitbit Premium costs £7.99 a month and also gives you access to other coaching programs and useful information, but we don’t think you should have to pay for this considering you’ve just forked out 140 quid for the tracker. 

You do at least get given a six-month free trial when you buy the Charge 6, though. 

The exercise app on the watch lets you pick from about 40 different exercises, ranging from the obvious to sports like canoeing, kickboxing, pilates, and spinning. All this gets recorded for you to view in the app later. More enthusiastic sports fans can now link the Charge 6 via Bluetooth to compatible gym equipment such as Peloton bikes, or link live heart rate data to apps like Strava.

• Google Wallet and Maps
• YouTube Music controls
• Smartphone notifications syncing

As Fitbit is now owned by Google, you must sign into the Fitbit app using your Google account. You can then use the built-in Google Wallet and Google Maps apps on your wrist. We easily linked our debit cards to pay contactlessly, and we’re glad to see the back of the Fitbit Pay app that had terrible UK bank support.

Maps can give you turn by turn directions on your wrist when you start a navigation from your phone, but it’s worth noting for some reason it doesn’t include public transport routes, only walking or driving. It’s also the one feature we found buggy – it sometimes simply didn’t connect to the Maps app on our phone.

There are no third party apps for the Charge 6, so that means no Spotify, Strava, or any other popular apps you might get on other wearables. Because this is a Google Fitbit now, you do get a built in YouTube Music app, but all this does is control YouTube Music playing on your phone. You’ll of course need a YouTube Music subscription to get the most out of this, but we found it works reliably – but you can’t download music tracks to the Charge 6 to listen to offline.

All this new functionality is nice to have but you really do have to live in the world of Google products to get the most out of it. It means the band is compatible with all Android phones running Android 9.0 or newer, though it does also connect to iPhones. You can get notifications on your wrist from either phone platform but you can only send quick responses to messages if you’re on Android.

• Up to 7 days on a charge
• Less when using GPS
• Charges via included proprietary cable

One of the best things about the Fitbit Charge 6 is its excellent battery life. It can go up to seven days on a single charge when you don’t have the always-on display turned on and if you don’t really use GPS tracking. If you want to use both of these battery life is going to hover around three to four days, but that’s still better than most smartwatches on the market and means you can wear the tracker for several days without worrying about it dying.

It charges via a magnetic proprietary snap-on USB-A cable that’s included in the box but there’s no charging brick so you’ll have to plug it into one you already own, or a computer.

The Fitbit Charge 6 costs £139.99. This is a very reasonable price considering all the high-end fitness and smart features it packs in.

You can buy it from Fitbit, Amazon, Argos, Currys, and Very.

The Fitbit Charge 6 is an outstanding activity tracker and the best one you can buy right now. For the reasonable price, you get an amazing set of health and fitness features, tons of accurate data, mobile payments, and ridiculously good battery life all stuffed into a slim, lightweight band that’s comfortable to wear all day and night.

The main downside is that you have to pay for Fitbit Premium every month to get full functionality out of it, but aside from that this is an excellent fitness device that’s an excellent alternative to a more expensive, more cumbersome smartwatch.