Now that Fitbit has established its presence in Malaysia, its new products will make their way here much faster. The recently-announced Fitbit Blaze and Fitbit Alta fitness wearables are now officially available in Malaysia, at RM950 and RM630 respectively. The Blaze was the first to be unveiled, and it is a “smart fitness watch” as Fitbit would call it, that has a nice color display and an embedded optical heart rate monitor. Alta is the successor to the Fitbit Charge (the non-HR variant) but unfortunately due to the weak ringgit, Alta’s price is higher than Charge’s launch price was. Besides being newer, the Blaze and Alta are also designed to be more stylish than their predecessors.
Both fitness wearables can now be found at official Fitbit Malaysia retail partners, and all 20 of them are listed here. Some of the partners include RadioShack, All IT Hypermarket, Courts, and senQ, but you can even buy them online through stores like Harvey Norman and Superbuy.
Fitbit Blaze aims to be a smart fitness watch as mentioned earlier, but a direct successor to the Fitbit Surge it ain’t. Though it markets itself to have a “connected GPS” feature, it lacks a built-in GPS sensor and this mode requires it to be paired to a smartphone that has GPS, unlike the Surge which has an integrated GPS chip. The Blaze does have an improvement over the Surge — Blaze now comes with a color OLED touch display. Otherwise, other features are similar to the Surge, including the PurePulse Heart Rate sensor, a five-day battery life, all-day activity tracking, automatic exercise recognition, multi-sports mode, automatic sleep tracking, and music controls. The watch can vibrate as a silent alarm to wake you up, and also does basic smartphone notifications like calls, text, and calendar. And yes, it tells the time too. Because of the lack of GPS, Blaze’s price of RM950 is still lower than Surge’s launch price of RM968. Fitbit Surge’s price has since surged to RM1,280.
Fitbit Alta adopts the classic Fitbit wristband form factor, but this time around it is more fashionable, and the straps can be replaced too. At RM630, Alta sits above the Charge (launch price RM510, now RM560), but a little under Charge HR (launch price RM620, now RM690). The reason is obvious, Alta is clearly a successor to Charge, but it lacks the photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor, better known at the optical heart rate monitor the Charge HR has. I won’t be surprised that Fitbit will release an Alta HR later in the year. Fitbit Alta can do everything the Blaze could, except tracking of floors climbed, multi-sport, and heart rate (as mentioned), as well as the lack of music controls and even the “connected GPS” feature that the Blaze has.
The nice thing with successor products is that the designers get to improve upon previously-overlooked design flaws or complaints. Blaze and Alta now come with replaceable straps (Surge and Charge don’t), and these accessories are also available in Malaysia. Alta’s Classic band is available at RM130, while the Luxe leather band is RM250. Blaze’s Classic straps is at RM130 too, but the price goes up to RM450 for the Luxe leather band, and the Luxe band with stainless steel links are even more absurd in price, at RM580. At that price, I can already buy myself a Fitbit Flex, which by the way, has a replaceable wristband too.
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