Technologies
5 Best Fitbits for 2023: Top Fitness Trackers
How to find the right Fitbit for you.
Fitbit is the go-to brand when it comes to fitness wearables. That’s for good reason: It offers high-quality products at different price points, ranging from budget to premium options. When looking for the best fitness trackers around, it doesn’t matter if you’re a serious workout enthusiast or someone who simply wants to track their physical activity. Fitbit has you covered. We’ve tested out every Fitbit on the market to help you decide which is best for your lifestyle.
CNET’s reviews of Fitbit, the Google-owned brand that’s got so many people excited about tracking their steps, consider features like sleep tracking, activity tracking; heart-rate monitoring; heart rate tracking; and stress tracking. There are even workouts available in the Fitbit app when you invest in an optional Premium membership. Whether you’re shopping for gifts or just perusing the different Fitbit devices out there, here’s a roundup of the best Fitbits available right now.
Fitbit
If you’re looking for a fitness tracker that offers the best available features for collecting health data, while also being comfortable, easy to use (no buttons) and easy to read outside in the sunshine — all at a reasonable price — Fitbit’s Charge 5 wins. In fact, the Charge 5 was recently awarded a CNET’s Editors’ Choice Award.
The Charge 5 tracks things such as your heart rate through an EKG reading app, your stress level through an electrodermal activity sensor, and your blood oxygen level and skin temperature. It also tracks your sleep patterns, including breathing rates, sleep stages and restlessness. The Charge 5 monitors over 20 different physical activities, including swimming (it’s water-resistant), yoga and cycling. It also has a built-in GPS, which is great for runners and has 20 exercise modes.
The Charge 5 is compatible with iPhones and Androids. However, iPhone users can only see notifications on the Charge 5 screen, while Android users may send quick replies.
Vanessa Hand Orellana/CNET
The Versa 3 is a Fitbit smartwatch that combines the best features of the Charge 5 tracker with the «taking calls on your wrist» aspect of a smartwatch rather than purely a fitness tracker. Although Fitbit’s best smartwatch and best Apple Watch alternative may not be quite as smart as its Apple or Galaxy Watch competitors, it is compatible with both Apple and Android operating systems, and can also be paired with either Alexa or Google Assistant. One of the best features of the Versa 3 is its strong battery life — up to six days without the «always on» display and with moderate use. (The Apple Watch, for comparison, has a less-than-ideal battery life of a day and a half.)
The more expensive Fitbit Sense provides more health data, but the relevance of all the data Sense gives you might be moot, depending on if you know how to read medical charts. You’ll save money and lose little by going for the Versa 3 smartwatch instead.
A note about Fitbit’s Premium subscription: For $10 a month or a one-time payment of $80 for a year, Fitbit’s Premium subscription can give you more insight into your sleep and stress patterns, as well as things such as guided meditation and workouts. The Versa 3 comes with a three-month trial of Premium, and the Charge 5 comes with a six-month period. To find out more about whether Fitbit Premium is worth it, check out this guide.
Fitbit Premium also includes what it calls a Daily Readiness Score, which is Fitbit’s assessment of whether you need to take it easy today or if you should push yourself based on your goals for the week. This is now available for some Fitbit models, including the Versa 3.
Screenshot by Sareena Dayaram/CNET
The Fitbit Inspire 2 is the cheapest device for adults, and it gets the job done. The «easy» Fitbit tracks health essentials that include Active Zone Minutes and heart rate. The Inspire 2 comes with a free yearlong premium subscription so you can unlock personalized health insights and programs to help you improve your nutrition, sleep and other aspects of health.
The Inspire 2 doesn’t have GPS, and it doesn’t include special features such as being able to measure your blood oxygen level, but this tracker is a great (and more affordable) introduction to fitness tracking if you or someone you know is interested in monitoring their health information. The Inspire 2’s included subscription to Fitbit Premium is also far more generous than other Fitbit models.
Fitbit
If you want to count your steps and look like you’re wearing jewelry instead of a fitness device, the Fitbit Luxe is for you. It offers many of the same features as other Fitbits, such as goal-based workouts, but it does so in a smaller and more fashionable form that might be best for smaller wrists. (The design in general is smaller, so the text on the watch’s screen may also be too small for some people to read.) You can also pick it up for $50 off at most retailers right now.
Aside from its sleeker appearance, the biggest difference between the Luxe and other models might be its focus on general wellness tracking over more specific health data. When the Luxe calculates your stress rate, for example, it uses activity levels, sleep and heart rate instead of an electrodermal activity sensor as seen in the Charge 5 and Sense.
Fitbit
This one is pretty simple: The Fitbit Ace 3 is specifically for kids to help track sleep and activity, two crucial things for young bodies. Goals can be set on the Ace 3 for active minutes as well as reminders for going to bed and staying active. For kids who have their own phone, the tracker can also deliver call notifications (you know, for when you forget to call Mom).
The Ace 3 comes in cosmic blue with green adjusters, black with red adjusters or a «Minions yellow» for kids who are fans of the goggle-eyed animated creatures.
Technologies
You Can’t Trust Your Car’s Driving Assistance System Yet, AAA Report Finds
Both hands-on and hands-off systems required human intervention to avoid accidents in this study.
Technologies
Google’s AI Mode Is Getting New Agentic Features for Restaurant Reservations and More
AI Mode can now do most of the work to find dinner reservations for you.
Google’s AI Mode is getting new agentic capabilities and expanding to 180 new countries and territories around the world, Google announced Thursday. AI Mode allows you to ask questions directly to Google and it’ll kick off a series of searches on your behalf. From there, it will surface relevant information to your query without the need to do any of the deep research yourself. It changes the way you search for things online, and it’s getting even smarter with this latest rollout.
Powered by DeepMind’s Project Mariner, the latest additions bring us further into the agentic AI future we’ve been promised for some time, directly from a search box. Instead of just finding things for you, AI Mode can now do things for you, like finding dinner reservations, flights or concert tickets. The update also brings personalized recommendations and link-sharing capabilities for easier collaboration with friends and family.
Most of the new features are either limited to premium AI subscribers and tucked behind an experiment in Google Labs, but it might not take long before they’re a standard part of your future search experience.
Google did not immediately respond to CNET’s request for further comment.
Restaurant recommendations
Instead of searching for restaurant reservations and then clicking on a specific website to make a reservation, AI Mode surfaces everything you need to complete the action right there. Since it’s contextually aware, you can add specificities to your query that a typical Google search wouldn’t handle well.
You can add the type of cuisine, number of people, time and location to a single query, and AI Mode will get to work and display real-time restaurant reservation time slots to choose from.
Google says it’s partnered with OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Ticketmaster and several other companies to make finding and doing what you want easier, since you won’t have to put in the legwork yourself.
This feature is currently rolling out to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US who have enabled the specific experiment in Labs.
Personalized recommendations
Another experiment that’s currently available in the US (that also needs to be enabled in Labs) is personalized recommendations. Google says it’s starting with dining-related recommendations, which implies more options will be on the way in the future.
The experiment will use your past conversations with AI Mode, places you’ve interacted with on Search and Maps to provide suggestions tailored specifically to you.
Share AI Mode links with others for collaboration
If you’re planning a vacation or a party, you can now share your research directly with others with a new link-sharing feature built into AI Mode. People who interact with the link will be sent to the last response sent by AI Mode and can continue the conversation on their own to do more exploration on the topic. The original sender of the links can manage them and delete them at any time.
For more, don’t miss everything Google announced at its Pixel 10 event.
Technologies
IPhone or Android, Here’s How to Finally Escape That Endless Group Chat
Done with a group chat? Here’s how to ghost it on any service.
One reason people prefer group chats in Apple’s iMessage or RCS texting is the extra control and security these platforms provide. If everyone in your group is using iPhones, or if you’re on Android chatting through RCS, you’ll get features like typing indicators, high-quality media sharing, and the option to mute or leave a conversation when you need fewer notifications.
The biggest advantage is privacy. Both iMessage and RCS group chats offer end-to-end encryption, so your conversations stay secure. The only time that doesn’t apply is when a thread includes a mix of iPhone and Android users, which limits encryption support.
Knowing these differences can help you manage your chats more effectively, whether you’re keeping up with friends, planning events, or just looking for a little more control over your notifications.
And with RCS support with iOS 18, group chats that include a mix of iPhone and Android participants have more features than ever — but it’s not at the level you’ll experience when a conversation is fully on iMessage or Google Messages. «Green bubble chats» from an iPhone to an Android phone can now include typing indicators, higher-quality media and easier group chats.
However, RCS conversations between the iPhone and Android phones don’t include encryption now, but it should be added in a future update. This will hopefully give these conversations a similar level of privacy that we expect when using chat services like iMessage, WhatsApp or Signal.
Regardless of how you’re in a group chat with others, you can leave a chat. Here are the steps to leave any conversation from your phone’s texting app, regardless of whether it’s happening on iMessage, RCS or as a mixed MMS chat.
Leaving group chats on an iPhone
You can leave group conversations on your iPhone in two ways. You can either mute a chat,which keeps you in a conversation but you no longer receive notifications about it, or you can outright leave and no longer have access to the chat.
On an iPhone, open Messages and go to the chat thread you want to leave. At the top of the screen are conversation controls, a group of icons with the participants. Tap this to open a pop-up menu. As long as your conversation has four or more participants, iOS gives you the ability to tap Leave this Conversation with red text. If your chat has three or fewer participants, though, the option is grayed out, but you can tap Hide Alerts to prevent the conversation from notifying you further. Tapping Hide Alerts also allows you to mute a conversation, letting you keep access to a chat without necessarily leaving it. These steps apply to both iMessage conversations and to those over RCS.
Hide and block MMS chats on an iPhone
Although you can’t officially leave MMS group chats, you can hide or block the conversation. It’s not as good as outright leaving a conversation (other participants will still see you as in it), but you at least have no personal evidence of the conversation continuing.
On an iPhone, visit the group chat and tap the conversation controls. Instead of seeing Leave this conversation, you will see the option to Delete and Block this conversation. If you’d rather just mute the conversation instead of deleting and blocking it, you can hit Hide Alerts to mute it.
Leave group chats on an Android phone
On an Android phone using Google Messages, visit the chat thread you want to leave. Tap the conversation’s name to bring up the Group Details menu. Within this menu is the Leave Group button. Unlike with iMessage, you can leave chats with as few as three participants.
If you want to just mute notifications, tap Notifications on the Group Details screen to bring up a window with notifications controls. This includes options to make the conversation stay Silent to prevent it from ringing your chat, and if you tap Lock Screen, a pop-up menu will give you the option to prevent notifications. Tap Don’t show notifications at all to enable.
Hide and block MMS chats on an Android phone
On an Android phone with Google Messages, follow the same steps to access options for controlling notifications. This includes visiting the MMS chat thread and then tapping either the name of the conversation or the names of the participants at the top to bring up the Group Details menu. You won’t see a Leave Group option like you did with an RCS thread, but you do get the same ability to tap Notifications to access controls for hiding the conversation. This includes the same options for turning the conversation to Silent and to select Don’t show notifications at all.
SMS vs. MMS vs. RCS
SMS stands for Short Message Service and debuted in 1992. Text messages are limited to 160 characters. MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service and supports sending photos, videos or other files and messages longer than 160 characters. MMS supports a group of people chatting in a single conversation thread, while SMS can text multiple people at once but is sent as individual messages to each person. RCS, which launched 15 years ago, is short for Rich Communication Services and can show typing indicators, read receipts and has end-to-end encryption.
While cross-platform chat apps like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram have better controls for conversations, encryption and privacy, regardless of the type of phone participants are using, they don’t support SMS, MMS or RCS. That’s why the default messaging app on most phones is still widely used, even if it means that a group chat is on a less feature-filled, unsecured standard like MMS.
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