Meet Fitbit’s newest device, the Fitbit Ionic smartwatch

After nearly a year of rumors, Fitbit finally announced its first smartwatch today—the Fitbit Ionic. For the past 10 years, Fitbit has been one of the biggest players in the wearables game. However, it took the company a while to embrace the smartwatch trend. Last year's Fitbit Blaze was the closest the company got to creating a smartwatch, but the Blaze wasn't advanced enough to take on the Apple Watch or any Android Wear devices. Apple's and Google's products are what many think of immediately when the word "smartwatch" comes to mind. Fitbit is clearly trying to infiltrate the mindset of those consumers with the $299 Ionic but without forgetting its fitness roots in the process.

Hardware

The photos leaked earlier this year proved to be accurate depictions of Fitbit's smartwatch. The Ionic is a marriage of Fitbit's Blaze and Surge trackers, featuring a unibody module with detachable band parts on either end. The module is made out of aerospace-grade aluminum and was created using nano-molding technology. That process molds metal and plastic together to make a unibody that's both strong and lightweight. It also allows Fitbit to make the Ionic as compact as possible by grouping together the Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS antennas inside the device. While the Ionic's shape may be polarizing, it's an upgrade from the Blaze's awkward design that forces you to pop the rectangular module out of its harness whenever you need to charge it.

The Ionic's button situation is similar to that of the Blaze: its single left-side button powers on the device, while the two right-side buttons are used during workouts to pause and save data. The Ionic does have a full-color touchscreen that you can use during workouts as well as in regular use, but tactile buttons make better controls when your hands are sweaty from working out. The touchscreen is super bright at 1,000 nits, making it great for viewing in direct sunlight. In the short time I've spent with a pre-production Ionic, I never had a problem reading the display during outdoor workouts when the Sun was at its strongest.

Guts and sensors

Let's talk about what's inside the Ionic. Aside from the typical accelerometer and motion-detecting sensors, there's also an optical heart-rate monitor, GPS, NFC chip, an SpO2 sensor, and 2.5GB to store onboard music inside. The optical heart-rate monitor is similar to one used by the Alta HR, but it has been improved in the Ionic, both in its algorithms and in its design.

The underside of the smartwatch lies flat against your skin, which should help the heart-rate monitor glean more accurate readings of your pulse. Many other fitness devices have bubbles or uneven surfaces around the heart-rate monitor, and those can create pressure zones on your wrist that can impede the sensor's reading. The flatter the sensor lies against your skin, the more accurate it should be.

The newest and most surprising sensor to make it into the Ionic is the SpO2 monitor, which tracks the amount of oxygen in the blood. Fitbit claims this could help the device alert the user of sleep apnea, a condition that causes breathing interruption during sleep. You're more prone to sleep apnea if there's a lack of oxygen in the blood, so Fitbit's hoping the Ionic can tell people if and when this happens. It may be hard to test this feature, not only if you don't have sleep apnea, but also because there doesn't seem to be a way to randomly check the level of oxygen in your blood. Maybe that feature will come in the final version of the Ionic or down the line in the future.

Other notable new additions are NFC technology for contactless payments and onboard storage for music. The Ionic is the first Fitbit device that can make payments, and it uses Fitbit's own platform called Fitbit Pay. I tried this out once with my Ionic device and it worked pretty well: I loaded a card onto Fitbit Pay using the Fitbit app and set it as the single primary card for my Ionic (you can load more than one card onto your account, but only one at a time can be loaded onto the Ionic for payments). Then I held the device up to the reader when prompted to pay. As soon as the transaction went through, an alert popped up on my smartphone (and on the Ionic) detailing the amount paid. Fitbit Pay supports American Express, Visa, and MasterCard, making it easy for anyone with a major credit card to use it. No banks support Fitbit Pay at launch, but the company says it's in talks with some banks for future support.

Just as the rumors predicted, the Ionic can hold music, so you can connect wireless headphones to it and go work out without your smartphone. Fitbit claims the 2.5GB of storage can hold more than 300 songs, and you can also download Pandora playlists if you're a Plus or Premium member. I didn't get to try this feature out because the music section of the Fitbit app is still quite buggy, and that's likely because Ionic and its software isn't totally final yet. But Fitbit claims users will be able to download personal music to the Ionic using its desktop software and download Pandora playlists by connecting your subscription account to Fitbit.

To keep music lovers in the Fitbit ecosystem, the company also announced a pair of wireless headphones called Fitbit Flyer that are made to connect with the Ionic and provide dynamic sound while you're out without your smartphone.

The Fitbit Ionic is one of the few Fitbit devices that can track swimming as well. Fitbit introduced swim tracking with the Flex wristband, and the Ionic uses its unibody design to its advantaged when it's in the water. Unlike the Apple Watch Series 2 that has a hidden mechanism to eject water, the Ionic's unibody design prevents water from getting inside, making it water-resistant up to 50 meters.

There's one hardware feature that we truly can't assess until we test the Ionic out: battery life. Fitbit claims the Ionic will get at least four days of battery life, or 10 hours with GPS or music use. If true, it would be better than nearly every other smartwatch available in that respect: the Apple Watch Series 2 can last about two days with some GPS use, and Android Wear devices tend to last about a day under the same conditions.

Anyone still holding on to their Pebble smartwatch won't be fazed by this since many Pebble devices could last between five and 10 days on a single charge. While the Ionic isn't breaking any of those boundaries, it could be the modern smartwatch with the best battery life if Fitbit's claims hold up.