Fitbit Sense 2 Review: Robust Health Data Metrics Is Its Biggest Win

The screen on the Fitbit sense is beautiful, bright, and easy to see. And for some reason, if it’s not bright enough for you, you can max out its display in the watch’s settings. Swiping through the different screens is pretty intuitive to find what you want to do.The Fitbit AppThe Fitbit app is super intuitive and easy to use. The main screen is “Today,” and defaults to a few main metrics underneath: floors, miles, calories, and zone minutes. Click on any of them, and you’ll get more details on your numbers for each. Don’t want to see one or more of them? You can edit this screen and make any of the metrics go away. Underneath that, you’ll see a whole slew of other data, including health metrics, stress management score, sleep, readiness, exercise, skin temperature, and resting heart rate. Click on these, and you get more info on each. It’s worth noting that you need a Fitbit Premium subscription, which costs $10 a month, to unlock what it refers to as “advanced insights.” This includes breakdowns of your stress management and sleep scores, as well as skin temperature and daily readiness, among other features. The Exercise ScreenOne place I snagged, though, was the Exercise screen. Fitbit can track your workout through about 40 modalities, including common ones like running, strength training, spinning, walking, and bike riding, as well as slightly more off-the-grid options, like kayaking, indoor climbing, and surfing. Fitbit will automatically select the last three you chose to remain on the front of its Exercise screen, but there’s no way to manually configure that screen to the top three fields you want there. I was able to do that with the original Sense, and I spent a lot of time poking around the watch and the app to see if there was a way to do that on version 2, but no dice.Courtesy of authorThe Workout ScreenThere are three data sections on each Workout screen, and you can customize which fields you want to see in the settings section of each modality. For instance, if I’m running, I can select “distance” and “time” to be the top and bottom stats—those which stay the same throughout the workout—while you can swipe through the middle metric, cycling through things like pace, average pace, steps, or heart rate. As a runner, I really wish there was the option to have a fourth metric visible here: I like to see time, distance, pace, and heart rate when I’m running without having to swipe for it. This isn’t as big a deal in other modalities, like strength training, where pretty much the time and heart rate are all I’m looking for.AccuracySteps: I found the Sense 2 very accurate as a pedometer when counting daily steps: One day, my Sense 2 watch buzzed as I hit my step goal (10,000 steps) going up my apartment stairs, and my Garmin vibrated about five seconds later when I hit the top, telling me the same thing.