The two latest Fitbit products, the Fitbit Edge and Fitbit Air, are good examples of this. If you’re looking for a solid fitness tracker or screenless wearable, these two look like well-priced and capable options.
Google has really pulled out all the stops with the recently released Edge, and the Air is a solid device in its own right.
I like both of these devices. But I have one question: Why are such good wearables shackled to a terrible charger?
The new Fitbits are really good
Google’s design and execution are on point
The Fitbit Edge and Air may only really be Fitbit products in name, but they’re still excellent devices that show why Fitbit has become such a household name over the years.
While I still have some questions about the Fitbit Edge’s place in Google’s roster, after getting my hands on one, I have to admit it’s very good at being what it is.
Google kidnapped the Fitbit Charge 6 and put it through the Google-fication Machine to make the Edge, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good device.
The Edge is solidly built, comfortable to wear, and performs exceptionally smoothly. The tracking features I’ve used so far have been good, and it has enough features to justify its price point.
The Edge, and the previously excellent Air, show Google knows what it’s doing when it comes to devices. So why are its chargers so astronomically bad?
The new Fitbit charger is one of the worst I’ve used
Wearable chargers are usually bad, but these really take the biscuit
It’s hard to understate how badly designed the Air and Edge’s shared charger really is.
I’ve used a lot of smartwatch and wearable chargers over the years, and since there’s no agreed-upon standard, they tend to be weird at best and bad at worst.
A rare few are good. The Samsung Galaxy Watch‘s puck charger is decent enough, even if it has some problems. Polar‘s and Garmin‘s chargers are alright, but not chargers I’d choose to use. Others tend to fall somewhere in this range of “good” to “what were they thinking?”
Google’s Fitbit chargers are some of the worst I’ve used in a long time.
Like many wearable chargers, it’s basically a magnetic puck on the end of a USB-C cable. Wearables generally don’t include USB-C ports (with one notable exception), so most use some sort of shallow connector, wireless charging, or pogo pins.
The Air and Edge’s charger is similar to Fitbit’s older charger, but with a splodge of Google’s design on top — which is where things start to go wrong.
In shape, it’s a squashed oval, with the two wide, flat ends holding the cable and the magnetic pogo pins. The pin end is slightly concave, which, in theory, holds the charger against the device with magnets.
In practice, it charges, sure. But the magnets don’t hold well enough.
Magnetic chargers are nothing new, and I’ve seen a number of them over the years. While these magnets are rarely strong enough to hold a device snugly, you can design the charger so it doesn’t have to. For instance, you can let it sit flush to the ground so gravity does the hard work.
But that’s not how the Fitbit charger rolls. Because it’s a squashed oval with the cable on the flat end, it naturally rests on the thin and wide end. That leaves the device resting on its side, at a 90-degree angle to the ground.
The strap should hold it there, but it’s still fighting gravity the entire time it’s charging. As a result, every movement threatens to nudge it away from the thin pins, halting charging.
The Air has a mixed experience with the charger. If it’s disconnected from the strap, then it’s fine. But if you keep the strap on, then the charger is harder to keep connected. Thankfully, a charging light tells you when it’s charging. But it’s the Edge that loses the most from the terrible charger.
For starters, the charger makes the device rest on its screen, risking scratches. And if you stick it on its side instead, the slightest slip stops charging.
This has some practical implications for the device. During the Edge’s setup process, you link your devices by copying a code from the Edge to your phone. Standard stuff, except it also asks you to keep your Edge charging during the process.
So my Edge is face-down, displaying a code I can’t see, and moving it shifts the screen when the charger disconnects.
Yes, this is a small annoyance, and you can work around it — but you shouldn’t have to. The charger shouldn’t actively make your device experience worse, but it does.
This cannot be the best Google can manage
They can do better than this
I understand that designing a charger for a wearable device is tricky. There’s a lot more to it than just sticking a port at the bottom.
I’ve seen a lot of chargers over the years, but Google’s Fitbit charger is one of the worst. The shape is large and annoying, easily getting caught in cable tangles and bags, and it doesn’t even hold the device well while charging. The only positive is that you don’t need it much, thanks to the long battery life of the devices it charges.
The Fitbit Edge and Air are good devices, and it’s clear Google’s team has taken a lot of time and care in designing a pair of devices that work extremely well at what they do. Which is why it’s so baffling that such a bad charger was allowed to skip past them.
The Edge and Air deserve a better charger, and so do you. It’s bad, and Google can do much better.
