Fitbit Ace LTE Assessment: The Finest Child’s Smartwatch

As an grownup, we’ve all grow to be inured to health tracker gamification—all of the humorous little incentives to up your step depend and get shifting. It’s wild to see a toddler expertise health gamification for the primary time, particularly since most youngsters have an excessive amount of power to start with.

The Ace LTE, Fitbit’s new smartwatch for youths, incentivizes kids between the ages of seven and 14 to put on their mixture health tracker, location sharer, and communication system with a proprietary video games studio referred to as Fitbit Arcade. The kid can unlock activity-based video games with a sure variety of steps, and it’s time-limited, to allow them to play for only some minutes at a time.

It additionally has an eSIM with built-in LTE connectivity, so that you and your baby can textual content and name one another, and you may find them in Google Maps. Faucet to Pay by way of Google Pockets can also be coming quickly. This watch solves plenty of issues for me and my elementary-school-aged kids. Nonetheless, I’m undecided that Google’s beta testers have adequately ready their software program engineers for my two children, who, in the event that they see that they want 1,500 extra steps to unlock a sport, will dash round the home at high pace for 20 minutes till they get them.

Delicate or Spicy Sauce

The Ace LTE smartwatch is available in two colorways: Spicy Pebble and Delicate Pebble. Each have a stainless-steel case with plastic buttons and a polyester woven strap with a plastic clasp. It’s about 41 by 45 mm throughout—so, it’s sizable, however nothing that my 7-year-old and 9-year-old really feel is unwieldy. The one time my son desires to take it off is when he’s enjoying violin. It’s a Fitbit, so it really works with each Android and Apple telephones.

{Photograph}: Adrienne So

It has a 5 ATM score, which suggests it may possibly stand up to the strain exerted by 50 meters of water. Nonetheless, whereas it gives some safety, it would not have a dustproof score. The display screen is constructed from Corning Gorilla Glass 3 with an OLED panel that’s a lot vibrant sufficient to see in pure daylight. It additionally comes with a protecting plastic bumper; I requested my daughter whether or not she needed to take it off so her watch would look just a little extra grown-up, and he or she stated no.

It could be a toddler’s smartwatch, however it’s a Fitbit, and it does have the total suite of sensors—an accelerometer, optical coronary heart price sensor, magnetometer, ambient mild sensor, and gyroscope. A number of individuals have requested me, incredulously, whether or not I believe it’s correct when it says that my son is racking up between 16,000 to twenty,000 steps a day. All I’ve to say is, you wouldn’t ask me that query when you may see him on our trampoline.

On the finish of a full day—from 6:30 am to round 7:30 pm for my children—the battery is all the way down to round 13 or 20 p.c, which is rather less than the 16-plus hours that Google advertises, nevertheless it works for us. Each evening, I put it on the charger after they go to mattress at 8 pm, and so they’re at all times totally charged by the point I am going to mattress at round 10 pm.