So for the past week I have been wearing the Fit3 on my left arm and my Galaxy Watch5 on my right arm. I have also worn two other Fit3's on my right arm to triple check any issues I had with my own Fit3 to make sure it was not just a defective unit I had.
So let me start with the positive aspects of the Fit3.
The Fit3 is small and light and has an almost put it on and forget feel to it. Perfect for tracking your sleep as you don't even know it's there on your wrist. Speaking of Sleep Tracking, I found the Fit3 did a very good job of tracking my sleep and almost always matched up very closely to my Galaxy Watch5 on my other wrist, which by the way is not very comfortable to sleep with it on your wrist.
The display is large and very bright and easy to read out in direct sunlight and you can customize the watch face but just one of them as shown in the first attached photo.
The touch display of the Fit3 is perfect. It is fast and responsive and never lags. Lift to wake is also very good and I never had a time that it did not wake up when I lifted up my wrist. You can also turn on touch to wake which also works good and you have the hard button on the right side of the Fit3 that also will wake the screen if pressed. You can change the screen timeout of both the tap to wake and the hard button press from 4, 7, 10, 15 and 30 seconds with the default of 7 seconds set out of the box. The "Left to Wake '' feature is always at 4 seconds independent of what the screen timeout is set at and is most likely to help save battery life.
Navigation around the menus on the Fit3 is fast and fluid and intuitive for the most part but there are some settings, especially in the Samsung Health Menu that are buried very deep and take a bit of searching around to get to.
So at this point in time I would give the Fit3 a very high score of 4.5 out of 5 stars.
But then comes the negative side of this review:
There are 87 exercises you can select in the Samsung Health App on your phone and on top of that you can add a "Create new exercise", all fine and dandy, the major bug that kills the Fit3 as a "fitness tracker" is that any of the 87 exercises that uses the GPS tracking of your phone over the Bluetooth connection to the Fit3 WILL NOT record in the Samsung Health App on your phone if you manual start the workout on the Fit3. It is very easy to know which workout exercises use "attached to phone GPS over BlueTooth" as when you select that exercise it will show you a screen with the green point on map symbol and will say "Detecting..." and after it locks you location it will just a a green circle with a check mark in it and will say "Ready" right under that and a "Start" button pill at the bottom of the screen. I have attached both the "Detecting..." and the "Ready" "Start" screens to this review.
So which of these exercises are affected by this? Well probably any of them that take you out and away from your house on a journey. Walking, Running, Bike Riding, Hiking, even Yachting will be affected by this issue. Any exercise that does not use "attached to phone GPS over BlueTooth" like Circuit training, Yoga, Weight machines, etc... will not be affected by this problem.
So what happens with the workout exercises that use "attached to phone GPS over BlueTooth" that you start from the Fit3? Well they will be saved under Samsung Health on the Fit3 under "Workouts this week" but they will never transfer over to the Samsung Health App on your connected phone.
Your "Steps", "Active Time" and "Activity cal" will go up during these workouts but the "Activity cal" is usually about 100 calories lower than my Galaxy Watch 5 and it looks like the Heart Rate is to blame for that as it is lower most of the time than what the Galaxy Watch 5 shows for Heart Rate.
As for "Auto detected" workouts they "for the most part" do, for some reason, transfer over from the Samsung Health App on the Fit3 to the Samsung Health App on the connected phone as long as you are connected to the internet. I say "for the most part" as I have seen even some of my "Auto detected" walks not transfer over to the Samsung Health App on my phone.
Conclusion on this? Well I believe there is a bug in the Samsung Health App on either the Fit3 or on the connected phone that is not working correctly over Bluetooth. This is just my guess as I am not an engineer but I have chatted with Samsung Support about the issue both online live and via Email and have sent them all the possible info with photos for them to hopefully try and sort it out. Will they? Who knows. They are a very big company and this Fit3 is a very low cost and thus low profit device for them compared to the Galaxy Watch lineup. Time will tell.
The other issue with the Samsung Health Apps not syncing correctly is that the "My exercises Favorites" that you set on the phone never changes the Favorites on the Fit3 so you are always stuck with "Walking", "Running" and "Bike". This makes it hard to quickly launch MY favorite exercises of "Walking", "Circuit training" and "Yoga".
The remaining issues might also be tied in with the Samsung Health not syncing correctly between the Fit3 and the phone and those are Map route not recording and Fit3 built in Barometer not showing "Elevation gain" like it is supposed to.
Let's talk about battery life. Expect about 3 days of battery life, nowhere near Samsungs claimed 13 days. 3 days is without AOD but with continuous heart and stress monitoring on, One or two workouts a day, lift to wake on, tap to wake on and set to the default of 7 seconds, sleep tracking with SP02 and snore detection and your various messages received.
So that concludes my full week evaluation of the Fit3 (actually 3 Fit3's)
Final conclusion:
If you are only looking for a fitness tracker to track sleep and steps taken then this is as good as any to buy for a good price.
If you want more than that I CANNOT recommend the Fit3 at this time with bugs it has and they are major bugs and I can see why so many are being returned after purchase.
I give the Fit3 2 out of 5 stars.
I will of course change my review of the Fit3 if and when Samsung addresses these major bugs in the Samsung Health App syncing.
FULL disclosure: I was not given or paid any devices for this review. I purchased 3 Fit3's with my own money. The Fit3 I wore on my left arm for the week was paired to my Samsung Galaxy A52 4G. No animals were harmed in the making of this review.
Thank you for reading and I hope this helps you make an informed buying decision.
Akore
