display screens alta hr manufacturer

This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

The Fitbit Alta wristband includes a full organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screen that users can tap for reminders, a clock, and smartphone notifications. The screen is not a touchscreen, so users interact with the device by tapping the band, which is similar to previous Fitbit models. The Alta can also recognize the type of activity in progress such as running, walking, or playing sports. The Alta HR includes an added heart rate monitor (thus, the ‘HR’ in the name) and a new Sleep Stages feature, which is designed to show the user their stages of sleep rather than just the time asleep as offered in previous Fitbit devices.

According to a review of the Fitbit Alta HR from TechRadar, the device has an accurate step counter and heart rate reader. The review found that the screen is slightly unresponsive and the display is difficult to read in bright light.

The Fitbit Alta and Alta HR look visually similar, with a wristband that remains approximately the same wideness around the band. Fitbit advertises that the Alta HR is splashproof (meaning it should not be submerged in water) and can run for up to five days without being charged.

Fitbit"s thin Alta tracker dropped around this time last year, and the company is already making an update to it. Today, Fitbit announced the new Alta HR, a nearly identical version of the original wristband that now includes a heart rate monitor inside of it.

Fitbit claims the Alta HR is the slimmest wristband with a pulse tracker, and it"s certainly the thinnest heart rate monitor-equipped wristband I"ve used so far. According to Fitbit, the original $129 Alta and its $150 Charge 2 are its two best-selling trackers, and many customers flocked to the Alta for its design. But Fitbit also explained customers wanted more from the little wristband, and the most requested feature was a heart rate monitor.

The Charge 2 was Fitbit"s thinnest wristband containing a heart rate monitor, so the company had to shrink the internals to get everything to fit in the Alta. As a result, the internals are 25 percent smaller than those of the Charge 2, and spotting the difference between an Alta HR and an original Alta is difficult. They both have rectangular OLED displays that you can tap to scroll through various screens filled with activity stats, but the main visual difference is in the band. The Alta HR"s strap is slightly textured and has been reinforced with two watch-like security buckles that help fasten the device properly to your wrist. Fit is key to wrist-bound heart rate monitors; not only is the Alta HR available in small, large, and extra-large sizes, but those extra fasteners let you secure the band just tight enough to get an accurate pulse reading. Advertisement

Fitbit also claims the Alta HR consumes less battery life thanks to its shrunken guts. The company estimates the HR will get up to seven days of battery life on a single charge, and that"s with continuous heart rate monitoring throughout the day and night. Like the original Alta, the Alta HR can track sleep as well as daily steps, calories, and distance. But the Alta HR will be able to use heart rate measurements taken during sleep to inform new sleep statistics and insights.

According to Fitbit, the device"s heart rate monitor actually does more work now while you"re asleep than when you"re awake so it can estimate how long you"re in the various sleep stages: deep, light, and REM sleep. The information from the device"s heart rate monitor and accelerometer, plus your heart rate variability data, all get analyzed using machine-learning algorithms to give you sleep insights in the app that can help you sleep better. These insights will get better over time as you log more hours awake and asleep while wearing the Alta HR, but from the moment you start using the device, your data informs sleep insights. For example, let"s say you"ve been running about three to four times each week for the past month. During a week you haven"t slept well, a sleep insight card may show you that you generally sleep better on the days that you run, prompting you to try to log a run today in the hope that you"ll sleep better tonight. Advertisement

Sleep is the reason Fitbit, and particularly the Alta HR, may one-up most of the competition. Most other fitness trackers that monitor sleep only do so using the accelerometer in the device—if you move too much at night, it assumes you didn"t sleep well. Movement is not the best indicator of a good night"s sleep, but analyzing movement with heart rate data taken throughout the night makes that sleep data more useful. The HR still won"t be able to give you a perfect picture of your sleep quality, but it will give you a better picture than one painted with movement alone.

Also, the Alta HR"s thin and light design makes it easy to sleep with. Any of the fitness trackers I"ve tried that can track sleep have made it into my bed whilst on my wrist for multiple nights, and some are easier to wear than others. The best ones that have included pulse monitors have been thinner devices including the Charge 2 and Garmin"s Vivosmart HR—but even those are bulky compared to the Alta HR. We"ll fully review the device in the coming weeks, but Fitbit appears to have made one of the most friendly and effective sleep-tracking wristbands available with the Alta HR (if it works as advertised).

The Alta HR also has all the features of the original Alta, including automatic activity tracking, smartphone notifications, interchangeable bands in leather, sport, and metal styles, and a water-resistant design. As far as we know, Fitbit will continue to sell the original Alta at $129, while the Alta HR will be available at the end of March for $150. Fitbit"s new sleep statistics and insights will be available for the Blaze and the Charge 2, in addition to the Alta HR, at the end of March as well.

Fitbit announced the Alta HR today, an update to last year’s Alta that adds heart rate sensors to the bracelet-like activity tracker. A brief refresher on the Alta: it’s one of Fitbit’s more stylish trackers, and has a tap-sensitive, OLED display and five-day battery life. It tracks steps and sleep and shows notifications from the smartphone, but Fitbit says the number one request it got from customers was an Alta with continuous heart rate tracking. And so, here it is.

This makes the Alta HR the fourth Fitbit product line to include heart rate sensors; the Charge, Blaze, and Surge also have them. But Fitbit has been developing the Alta HR for nearly a year now, according to the company’s R&D director Shelten Yuen, working with Texas Instruments to try to shrink its heart rate monitor to a size that would fit in the tiny wristband, which is 25 percent smaller than the Charge 2. Yeun said the new Alta will also last seven days per battery charge.

Fitbit is also trying to lure in (and retain) more customers by offering more detailed sleep tracking data, or, what the company is labeling Sleep Stages and Sleep Insights. Fitbit wristbands have automatically tracked sleep for a couple years now, logging more than three billion hours of sleep, but the devices would only show wearers information on how long they slept. Now Fitbit will take motion data, along with heart rate variability, to show light, deep, and REM sleep stages. And the insights are supposed to draw a direct line between your daily activities and your sleep patterns, which has been, in theory, a kind of holy grail for these consumer wearables.

The new Alta HR costs $150, $20 more than last year’s Alta. It will ship in early April, around the same time the new sleep-tracking software rolls out to the Alta HR, the Charge 2 wristband, and the Blaze watch. Fitbit says it will continue to sell the older Alta wristband, the one that doesn’t track heart rate, as well as the Flex wristband and the Charge 2.

The new Alta HR wristband is coming at a challenging time for Fitbit. The company’s holiday quarter earnings were so disappointing that it prereleased its results in late January, and announced that it would be laying off more than 100 employees. At the same time, Fitbit is still considered the market leader in activity trackers.

There are a couple ways to look at this “new” Fitbit and sleep-tracking software. The first is that none of this is really new. The Alta HR form factor itself isn’t new; it’s the same wristband design from last year. Other companies, like Garmin and Xiaomi, also make thin activity-tracking wristbands with heart rate sensors, and Jawbone (while hardly a paradigm of consumer activity tracking these days) has offered detailed sleep tracking for years.

And, the fact that Fitbit managed to miniaturize its heart rate sensor technology, making it small enough to fit into the Alta wristband, points to Fitbit’s intentions of expanding into other product areas. It’s a given at this point that Fitbit is making a smartwatch, one that will likely support different apps, but CEO James Park has also said the company is exploring non-wrist-based gadgets.

Yuen, the director of R&D, said that shrinking the chip could also allow room for additional health sensors in future Fitbit products, though he declined to say exactly which health sensors the company is experimenting with.

Fitbit announced the Alta HR today, an update to last year’s Alta that adds heart rate sensors to the bracelet-like activity tracker. A brief refresher on the Alta: it’s one of Fitbit’s more stylish trackers, and has a tap-sensitive, OLED display and five-day battery life. It tracks steps and sleep and shows notifications from the smartphone, but Fitbit says the number one request it got from customers was an Alta with continuous heart rate tracking. And so, here it is.

This makes the Alta HR the fourth Fitbit product line to include heart rate sensors; the Charge, Blaze, and Surge also have them. But Fitbit has been developing the Alta HR for nearly a year now, according to the company’s R&D director Shelten Yuen, working with Texas Instruments to try to shrink its heart rate monitor to a size that would fit in the tiny wristband, which is 25 percent smaller than the Charge 2. Yeun said the new Alta will also last seven days per battery charge.

Fitbit is also trying to lure in (and retain) more customers by offering more detailed sleep tracking data, or, what the company is labeling Sleep Stages and Sleep Insights. Fitbit wristbands have automatically tracked sleep for a couple years now, logging more than three billion hours of sleep, but the devices would only show wearers information on how long they slept. Now Fitbit will take motion data, along with heart rate variability, to show light, deep, and REM sleep stages. And the insights are supposed to draw a direct line between your daily activities and your sleep patterns, which has been, in theory, a kind of holy grail for these consumer wearables.

The new Alta HR costs $150, $20 more than last year’s Alta. It will ship in early April, around the same time the new sleep-tracking software rolls out to the Alta HR, the Charge 2 wristband, and the Blaze watch. Fitbit says it will continue to sell the older Alta wristband, the one that doesn’t track heart rate, as well as the Flex wristband and the Charge 2.

The new Alta HR wristband is coming at a challenging time for Fitbit. The company’s holiday quarter earnings were so disappointing that it prereleased its results in late January, and announced that it would be laying off more than 100 employees. At the same time, Fitbit is still considered the market leader in activity trackers.

There are a couple ways to look at this “new” Fitbit and sleep-tracking software. The first is that none of this is really new. The Alta HR form factor itself isn’t new; it’s the same wristband design from last year. Other companies, like Garmin and Xiaomi, also make thin activity-tracking wristbands with heart rate sensors, and Jawbone (while hardly a paradigm of consumer activity tracking these days) has offered detailed sleep tracking for years.

And, the fact that Fitbit managed to miniaturize its heart rate sensor technology, making it small enough to fit into the Alta wristband, points to Fitbit’s intentions of expanding into other product areas. It’s a given at this point that Fitbit is making a smartwatch, one that will likely support different apps, but CEO James Park has also said the company is exploring non-wrist-based gadgets.

Yuen, the director of R&D, said that shrinking the chip could also allow room for additional health sensors in future Fitbit products, though he declined to say exactly which health sensors the company is experimenting with.

The original Alta now costs £100 (although it can be found for even less online), so is it worth spending an extra £30 for an optical heart rate monitor? Yes it absolutely is.

The addition of heart rate monitoring means greater accuracy in tracking the calories you burn and results in a more detailed breakdown of sleep (more on that later). The Alta HR can now also give an estimate of your resting heart rate, an excellent indicator of general fitness.

A few months after launching, Fitbit upgraded the app to offer Alta HR users Cardio Fitness Score, a feature that had previously only been available on the Charge 2 and Blaze. It’s an estimate of VO₂ max, or how efficiently your body can use oxygen, based on your resting heart rate and other bits from profile including your weight. While this could have been just another number, Fitbit cleverly places you on a spectrum of people of the same sex and age range.

Subsequent screens in the app then suggest how much you could improve the score with exercise, especially HIIT, or if you drop 5lb (2.3kg) of weight. If there’s one complaint we have with fitness trackers it’s that numbers are often provided without any context, so we give Fitbit a big hand for adding this feature and explaining it.

One question with all wrist-based heart rate monitors is accuracy and the ability to respond quickly to rapid changes in heart rate. We haven’t tested the Alta HR against a chest strap (which are inevitably more accurate), but we found it mostly passed the “that’s reasonable” test. Our resting heart rate moved around appropriately according to how healthily we were behaving and there were no outlandish readings when we looked at the screen during exercise.

Occasionally, however, we did find it didn’t display a heart rate during exercise even though we were wearing it according to Fitbit’s guidelines for exercise (tight and two finger-widths above the wrist bone). This was pretty rare, though.

We found ourselves hitting the 10,000-step goal a little earlier in the day than usual (we are very much creatures of habit) so the Alta HR may be a bit more sensitive to movement, but not outrageously so, and we have no way of knowing if our previous tracker was more or less accurate.

With all things tracker-related, it’s not really the absolute number that counts, it’s how it changes over time. Fitbit seems to know that and offers breakdowns of your steps over a day, a week, a month, three months or a year.

One feature that can be found in other models in this price bracket, but isn’t present on the Alta HR, is an altimeter to count stairs climbed. In the Fitbit range, that’s present in the Charge 2 and above, but Fitbit can be forgiven the omission on the Alta HR. They’ve already managed to fit a heart rate monitor into the Alta’s svelte frame.

The Alta HR automatically recognises and categorises 15 minutes or more of running as an exercise event (although you can reduce this time limit in the settings). Afterwards it provides you with the time spent running, a graph of your heart rate and the time spent in the three heart rate zones, calories burned and steps taken.

Where the Alta HR does fall down, however, is that it can’t see any of the GPS info (time, distance or pace data) on your wrist as you run. In fact, because SmartTrack isn’t shown on the screen at all you can’t even see a timer of how long you’ve been running for. You can keep tabs on your heart rate, which is useful if you’re following a training plan and like to use heart rate zones instead of terms like easy, steady and tempo, or if you’re looking to run intervals. But if you are that into your running that you’re planning on intervals, we’d recommend the Charge 2 – which has a feature dedicated to just that.

Although there’s no cycling option when starting GPS tracking in the app, it’ll still match itself up to a SmartTrack cycling event. Otherwise the Alta HR tracks exactly the same things for cycling as it does for running. It works if you’re a casual cyclist – perhaps a commuter like us – and want the activity to count towards your goals, but if you’re at all into cycling the Alta HR will feel feature-light pretty quickly.

The Alta HR isn’t waterproof so don’t take it into the pool or the shower. Fitbit only offers swim tracking on the cheaper Flex 2 – it seems to be one area that Fitbit’s happy to leave to the competition for now.

The Alta HR is the cheapest wearable in Fitbit’s line-up that offers Sleep Stages, which uses the heart rate monitor to add REM tracking to the breakdown of awake, light and deep sleep that’s common across brands.

With such a small screen the Alta HR can’t match the smartwatch pretensions of the Blaze, its older, bigger brother, but it makes full use of the real estate available by offering simple notifications.

It’s a useful addition and well executed, although we found it difficult to read the Alta HR’s screen during daylight, and we occasionally activated the screen by accident and couldn’t bring the message back again.

What the Alta HR can’t do is show notifications from third-party apps like WhatsApp, a feature that’s present on one of the Alta HR’s biggest competitors, the Garmin Vivoactive HR and Vivosmart 3. Whether that’s a problem depends on you – if we were buzzed every time someone posts in our fantasy football group our hand would be permanently numb.

Syncing with the app couldn’t be easier. The Alta HR pairs over Bluetooth in a matter of seconds every time you open the app or you can pull down the home screen to manually activate a sync.

The Fitbit app is one of the easiest to use, striking the right balance between a manageable layout at first glance and sufficient depth that you continue to stumble on new screens and details a fair while after first downloading it.

The Challenges tab offers a range of gamified competitions with friends (if you know any fellow Fitbit users) and solo challenges that allow you to virtually complete a route – like the New York Marathon – through your step count. Both are nice additions that may provide that little bit of impetus needed to change your routine and up your step count.

There’s the Garmin Vivosmart 3 (£130) which is packed full of features, but sacrifices the Alta HR’s ease of use and style and falls down on the cycling front by offering no info after rides.

Or there’s Fitbit’s own hugely popular Charge 2 (£140) which is very similar, but offers a few extra features and a larger, more interactive screen. But to make it as stylistically unobtrusive as the Alta HR you’d have to pony up £60 for the leather band.Fitbit Alta HR: Price Comparison

All those Fitbit insights add up to real lifestyle changes. In fact, researchers from Arizona State University discovered that the combination of wearing a Fitbit Zip activity monitor and expressing more mindfulness throughout the week increased levels of physical activity. For a relatively low cost (most models range from $50 to $250), fitness trackers help motivate you to kick-start and stick with a fitness plan, hold you accountable, encourage goal setting and, best of all, can help you lose weight.

If you want to boost your athletic training, get a good sports watch and a heart rate monitor. If you want to count your steps, use your phone. If you need a reminder to make healthy choices, hell, tying a piece of string around your finger will get you there. But if, for whatever reason, you think wearing a tiny computer on your wrist is the key to living your best life, fine. Be my guest. Let me introduce you to the Fitbit Alta HR.

Like all activity trackers, the Alta HR doesn"t offer life-changing feedback about your health. But it lets you log your fitness fundamentals without much fuss, and it includes a heart-rate monitor. So that"s cool. And it looks nice enough that you"ll actually wear it.

Fitbit"s seventh activity tracker is the smallest yet, in keeping with the company"s push to make its products feel less like computers and more like jewelry. The OLED display isn"t much wider than your finger, and works with a variety of bands available in materials like leather, stainless steel and, of course, rose gold. I hesitate to call it fashionable—it"s an activity tracker, people—but the sleek design all but disappears on your wrist.

Tapping the screen twice wakes it, then you tap once to toggle through the time, the step counter, heart rate, daily distance traveled, calories burned, and number of active minutes. Pairing it with your smartphone reveals more detailed information through the Fitbit app, and brings message and call notifications to the tiny screen. You can"t reply to those messages, but I found the gentle buzz of an incoming text weirdly satisfying.

In Fitbit, as in life, it"s important to set #goals. The Alta HR prompts you to create three: boosting your daily step count, drinking more water, whatever strikes your fancy. I made three, but I only ever remembered to take 10,000 steps each day because my Fitbit never reminded me about the others.

Still, the Alta HR does a nice job reminding you to get up and move. Once every hour between 9 am and 6 pm, (when you"re most likely to be sedentary), the band buzzes to coax 250 steps out of you. That"s harder than it sounds! You can customize the frequency of your reminders, or change the benchmarks. As you get closer to achieving your goal, the band chimes in with an encouraging message like, "Just 94 more steps!" Hit your daily step goal and the it lights up and buzzes with an intensity that I found far more validating that I care to admit.

The Fitbit app lets you manually log things like water consumption, caloric intake, and weight. But it really shines with the stuff it does on its own. The first day I wore the Alta HR, the SmartTrack feature recognized my morning bike commute. By the time I arrived at work, it had logged my 20-minute ride, recorded the distance, even tracked my heart rate throughout the ride, estimating how many calories I"d burned and how long I"d spent in the "fat burn" zone. Later in the week, I discovered it could parse the difference between a brisk walk and a run, both of which it logged without me even opening the app.

The HR lacks an altimeter, so don"t expect a gold star for taking the stairs. It doesn"t have a GPS tracker, either, so you"ll need another app to map your run. (Yes, the Fitbit offers distance estimates, but they"re imprecise.) Serious runners might balk at that. It isn"t waterproof, so swimmers are out of luck. And although the Alta HR recognizes aerobic workouts, it has no idea what you"re doing. You"ll have to log that Zumba class manually, you overachiever.