A Sensible upgrade to the premier Fitbit smartwatch?
Jump to:
- Announcement & release date
- Price
- Design
- New features and specs
The Fitbit Sense burst onto an already crowded smartwatch scene in late 2020, promising advanced health metrics and tracking features in a premium wrist-wrapping package. While it eventually delivered on most of its early promises, the wearable stumbled a bit out of the gate. When it launched, it lacked some of its most anticipated features like an ECG app, Google Assistant support, and audio responses from smart voice assistants.
The original Sense was a thing of beauty, and thankfully, Fitbit and Google have maintained an update cadence that not only brought those aforementioned features to the watch but added new ones like the ability to personalize low and high heart notifications, additional language options, and improved reliability of notifications and UI performance.
But in the 18 months or so since the Sense and Versa 3 launched, Fitbit hasn’t released a new smartwatch, sticking to trackers like the Charge 5 and Luxe. We have reason to believe Fitbit is hard at work on a new smartwatch successor that will deliver some major OS changes, but details are scarce.
Here’s what we know about a possible Fitbit Sense 2, and what features we’d like to see.
Fitbit Sense 2: Announcements and release date
Fitbit has remained bizarrely silent on news of upcoming hardware, whether its a Sense successor or any other Fitbit. The last public announcement came at Google IO 2021 in May, when Fitbit CEO James Park confirmed the brand’s next smartwatch will run Wear OS 3:
In the future, we’ll be building premium smartwatches based on Wear that combine the best of Fitbit’s health expertise with Google’s ambient computing capabilities.
Fitbit often announces new hardware in late summer, so we expected a new fitness watch to arrive late last year. Instead, the Galaxy Watch 4 remains the only Wear OS 3 watch available. Other Wear OS 3-eligible watches won’t receive it until “mid to second half of 2022,” and Google’s own long-rumored Pixel Watch isn’t expected to launch until after Google IO 2022. So it’s possible Fitbit’s pledge to use Wear OS backfired, and it needed an extra year to make its hardware work with the new OS.
We also know from leakers that the Pixel Watch will have Fitbit integration, so it’s technically possible that the Pixel Watch is the new Fitbit smartwatch in all but name. But we find it unlikely Google would repress such a popular brand just to prop up its own watch.
At this point, it doesn’t seem likely the Fitbit Sense 2 will arrive any sooner than August or September 2022, which fits Fitbit’s typical release calendar and ensures it doesn’t overlap with the Pixel Watch’s likely launch timeline.
Fitbit Sense 2: Price
As we mentioned above, the original Fitbit Sense was announced in September of 2020 and became widely available for purchase shortly thereafter. It debuted at a price of $329, the highest ever for a Fitbit wearable, but now costs $300 and has mostly stuck to $200 since Black Friday. Most successor watches tend to mimic their predecessors’ prices, so $300 to $350 for the Fitbit Sense 2 is a reasonable assumption.
Wear OS complicates the question, though. Running a more complicated OS requires more RAM and a faster chipset, which could increase the price. Many smartwatches rise as high as $400, which Fitbit could charge if it bundles in premium health sensors, a long battery life, and Wear OS.
Fitbit could also launch different sizes of the Sense 2, which could introduce price variance, and/or a version with LTE. So in theory, a baseline Fitbit Sense could cost even less than $300 while the largest and most expensive model could rise above $400. We’ll have to wait and see.
Fitbit Sense 2: Design
In the early fall of 2020, Fitbit explained that it was focusing its industrial design and UI/UX on something it called “Biologic Industrial Design Language,” which included a softer, curved look to mimic organic shapes in the human body. This look was rolled out on the Sense, Versa 3, and Inspire 2, and it can also be seen on the newest Fitbit — the premium Luxe tracker.
While a Sense 2 might look like the previous Sense and Versa watches on the outside, it’s a bit unclear how the software and UI might look on the new device. As we mentioned above, Fitbit CEO James Park said that the next premium Fitbit smartwatch would run Google’s Wear OS 3, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will look the same on a Fitbit watch, nor does it mean that a Sense 2, if it were to exist, would be the premium smartwatch Park was speaking of.
To help users properly navigate Wear OS, the Sense 2 will likely need more than one faux button on the side; like the Galaxy Watch 4, you’d likely need at least two. And the original Sense had a weird quirk: you couldn’t tap the display to wake it, only twist your wrist or squeeze the faux button. A proper smartwatch needs a more responsive display.
Fitbit Sense 2: New features and specs
The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4
The original Sense already packed the most advanced sensors of any previous Fitbit device, so we’d expect the Sense 2 to follow suit. It already has Fitbit’s latest heart rate monitor sensor, as well as the capability to read SpO2 levels, skin temperate, and electrodermal activity (EDA), and it’s likely that the next generation Sense 2 will have these capabilities as well. We also expect that the Sense 2 will retain NFC for contactless payments (though it might transition from Fitbit Pay to Google Pay) and that it will continue to have on-device GPS for exercise tracking. But what new features might it add to compete with the Apple Watch and the best Android smartwatches?
Because the Sense 2 would be Fitbit’s most advanced health tracker, perhaps it will borrow features from Apple and Garmin, like fall detection. We might also expect it to have more robust Fitbit Premium integration, including not only a free trial period but more on-device workout integration. Greater third-party app support would also be much appreciated, particularly if it runs on Wear OS 3.
The Sense (and Versa 2 and 3) all have onboard GPS, so it would be nice also to have on-device maps to track your workouts while you’re engaged in a run, hike, or ride.
One of the biggest missing features from Fitbit’s smartwatches is LTE, so it might make sense to see that added to the Sense 2. Whether that would be in the form of limited LTE for safety purposes as we see on the Garmin Forerunner 945 LTE, or more full-featured LTE as we’ve seen on Samsung’s Galaxy Watches remains to be seen. The Garmin implementation wouldn’t surprise me on a Fitbit-branded watch, but we would be shocked if the Google Pixel Watch didn’t have full LTE capabilities.
A leaked Pixel Watch watch face with Material You and Fitbit integration; the Sense could share this UI
In terms of software, the original Sense came with plenty of bugs, choppy performance, and missing features patched in after the fact. We can hope that Wear OS 3 and a revamped processor like the Snapdragon 4100+ — or a new 2022 chipset — will improve on that front, and that Fitbit will have used the extra year to deliver a complete package out of the gate.
Wear OS would deliver better integration with Android, including Material You theming and better third-party apps. But this new OS could also make Fitbits inaccessible on iPhones, which the brand may come to regret.
Still, if the Fitbit Sense 2 can add Wear OS features like app tiles, customizable watch faces, Google Maps navigation, and so on, it’ll likely be the best Fitbit yet.
The most premium Fitbit right now
Fitbit Sense
$200 at Amazon
$200 at Best Buy
$200 at Walmart
Holistic health
The current generation of Fitbit Sense is one of the most well-rounded, fully-featured health wearables on the market. It can track your steps, sleep, and stress and even gives you a portal to Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.