The Fitbit Ionic is now the cheapest it’s ever been as part of Amazon’s Cyber Monday deals
Three of the four colours are available at the bargain price of £180 – black/smoke grey, blue/grey and blue/orange – down from £250
As part of Amazon’s Cyber Monday deals, the Fitbit Ionic – the only Fitbit device to have a built-in GPS sensor – is the lowest it’s ever been at £180 – a saving of £70 on the £250 RRP.
Three of the four colours are available at this bargain price – black/smoke grey, blue/grey and blue/orange. The blue/ice grey model is still on offer but comes in at £196 instead of the lower £180. This is still a saving of £54.
Fitness trackers work with GPS in one of two ways – either they connect to your smartphone and piggyback (often unreliably) on the phone’s GPS sensors, or they have a GPS sensor built into the hardware.
The latter is more rare than you’d think for a device that relies on distances and locations for many activities, mainly because cramming the sensor into a small wrist-worn device is tricky and expensive.
In the history of Fitbit, only two devices have come with built-in GPS, and one of those – the Fitbit Surge – has long been discontinued. The other is the Fitbit Ionic: the smartwatch at the top of Fitbit’s pricing chart.
It comes with 2.5GB of storage for music and NFC for contactless payment, although the latter only applies if your bank is supported and not many in the UK are. It syncs with Windows vista and later, Mac OS X 10.6 and up, iPhone 4s and later, iPad 3 gen and later and its syncing range reaches up to 20 feet
Additionally, it has all the things you get in the other top models. It tracks heart rate, it tracks swimming and it shows smartphone notifications on screen, without you having to dig out your handset. You name it, it does it.
Unfortunately, when it was first released, the Fitbit Ionic was £300. That was a bridge too far for us, as we said in our Fitbit Ionic review. “If Fitbit had priced this around the £200 mark, I’d be perfectly happy to recommend it, purely because it’s a great-looking fitness tracking smartwatch with battery life to die for,” the review explained.
“As it is, the £300 price puts it firmly into Apple Watch Series 3 and Samsung Gear S3 territory – and it’s nowhere near the all-rounder that those watches are. That’s a shame, because there’s great potential here.”
Now it has fallen below this price, if you need a Fitbit with GPS built in, then it comes with our full recommendation.