Fitbit - gadget & customer service!

I don't often write reviews... Occasionally my run writes ups are like reviews, occasionally a company does something nice for the cause and gets a thank you...

This is a bit of a review and a lot of a thank you!

The idea behind Fitbit is simple - a total activity monitor... How many steps a day, how many flights of stairs, how many calories... It's a pedometer with bells and whistles. It's not a GPS watch (got one of them) it is nice and small (think USB stick).

And so it clips on to your belt, or bra (their advice not mine!) and just monitors you day in day out and the real selling point for me monitors your sleep - simple stuff on how many times you wake up and how long for.  But a data point I've not been able to access before, and as regular readers know I'm a data junkie as well as a run junkie...

Now what's clever, and addictive, is that Fitbit adds at least two layers of "gamefication" (I do jargon... ) the first is the flowers, the helicopter emails, the badges - you do something, you get a reward - a power up in gaming speak.  The second is the competitive element... You can play against your friends - a little league table of steps taken...

I love it, it would be very easy for me to focus solely on the running and forget I can do stuff during the day - the normal activity guidelines for anyone - walking a bit more, walking up a few more flights of stairs (yes even I get the lift from time to time)...

The Fitbit has been out on runs, on walks and even around the shops (Seriously, don't like exercise - hit the shops, plenty of things to distract as you wander around!!!!).  And then I took it for a fell run... and somewhere on the banks of Derwent Water it fell off!

Which left me genuinely upset, odd that a small bit of electronics came to be so useful in less than a month... and being at heart a cheeky chappy I wrote to Fitbit and explained my predicament, offering to cough up if they had a refurbished one, or a returned one and explained that it was helping me towards Challenge 25 ... and they very, very kindly sent me a brand new one!

So a cracking bit of kit, and excellent customer service.  You can find Fitbit here - I'm loving it and I'm only at the basic side of using it, there's groups and calories counters and everything else to try yet!

So a review and a thank you - neither of them asked for by Fitbit, as ever I'm a genuine soul... Now to double check my kit for the MadDog 10k in the morning, a cold but good race (it has a number, its a race) hopefully the cold in my nose is dead, the Fitbit will stay in my bumbag and all will be good in the world!

TTFN

Paul

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