I mentioned in yesterday’s post about my daily walks that my brother got me a Fitbit Charge 2 mid last year, I thought I’d write a quick review. (Actually, this is mainly an excuse to write down a story about how stupid I am.)
Anyway, yeah my bro got me a Fitbit. Or maybe I paid for it. I don’t really recall. The point is, I had it and I’ve been using it regularly for the past year and a half. It’s a great little gizmo, not only do I use it for step counts, but it also lets me track how much sleep I’m getting (which is why I know how rare a regular continuous 8-hour sleep is for me, even when I’m not working). I’m a big fan of measuring my own data for self-improvement purposes so I like it. Conveniently, it also works with IFTTT, so I have an applet that exports my daily data to the a Google Sheets for easy reference. In theory I could also use the Fitbit to track stuff like my food intake and weight, but those don’t happen automatically so I don’t. Maybe someday. The fitbit itself doesn’t use too much battery and has an Android app that syncs with the device via bluetooth (so I have bluetooth on all the time now).
One minor nitpick I have is that it my wrist doesn’t seem to like the fitbit too much, after a while I realized it was growing darker where I wore it. My brother suggested maybe I was wearing the wrist strap too tightly. After this realization, I sometimes started wearing it on the other wrist when I felt like it.
Okay, on to the stupid story! About 4 or 5 months after i started using the fitbit, this happened:
Oh noes! Normally you can just snap the strap part back into place, but this time something had come off and it wouldn’t stick back. I didn’t want to spend money on a replacement strap, so in a brilliant move that I would surely never regret, I glued it back into place with Mighty Bond. This worked well! The strap held in place and I could now use the fitbit again without worry.
Fast-forward another seven months or so later, and now the strap on the other side came off too! AND around the same time, my charger thingy fell apart as well, and I could not put it back together! Oh noes! Was this the end of my fitbit experiment?
Luckily it turns out a friend owned an online shop that could get me a replacement strap and charger for a good price (check out FitbitManila on Facebook if you’re interested), and it would be delivered to my house. All I had to do was wait a few days. During that time I was unable to charge the fitbit so it died.
When the goods arrived, I attempted to replace the faulty half-strap only. I couldn’t remove the other side since it was glued into place! What a surprising twist, I did regret that decision from just three paragraphs ago! And to make it worse, for some reason the replacement strap was not the same width as the older strap, so I can’t use the old half with the new half! I was forced to pry apart the glued half-strap, and I did eventually manage to do it, and now my fitbit was whole again, and I think I lost a couple of days data? Actually when I charged the fitbit again it was no longer sync’ed to my phone and I had to reinstall it. The replacement strap felt a bit off, but I got used to it soon enough, and here we are half a year later and I’m still using the Fitbit, hooray! Stupidity overcome!
All in all, I’m quite happy with my year and a half of fitbit usage. I’m told that the devices themselves last fairly long, even if the straps don’t, so I hope to be using it for at least a couple of years more, maybe? I’ll try never to glue the straps again.
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