The Charge line has mostly stuck to iterative updates over the years, and as one of the company’s most popular products, Fitbit’s adopted an “if it ain’t broke” strategy. One interesting point will be battery life. Fitbit’s multi-day battery life helps set its gadgets apart in a world increasingly dominated by premium smartwatches that can barely last longer than a day. However, color touchscreens are much more power-hungry compared to monochrome screens. It wasn’t an issue on the Luxe, but then again, the Luxe didn’t have built-in GPS either.
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It makes sense that Fitbit would focus more on its trackers this year. Not only did it come out guns blazing last year, but it’s also not likely to make much headway on the premium smartwatch front until next year. While CEO James Park said at Google I/O that the company would be working on a Wear OS 3 smartwatch, Google recently noted that the new platform wouldn’t be coming to non-Samsung watches until mid-2022 at the earliest. That would also give Qualcomm time to shape the hell up and deliver wearable chips that actually use tech from this decade.
We won’t have to wait too long to find out more about the Charge 5. Fitbit generally keeps to a spring-fall launch cadence, and it usually holds a launch event sometime around the end of August.
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