Fitbit Versa 4 review

For the majority of us, tech is a huge part of our everyday lives, whether that’s the smartphones we stay in contact with or the laptops we work from. In an effort to monitor our health and fitness, many of us have now started searching out the best smartwatches to wear. One of the market leaders of smartwatches, Fitbit is a well-known brand that many of us recognise. We put one of their most popular releases, the Fitbit Versa 4, to the test.

Fitbit Versa 4 overview

Key features

Exercise modes

The Versa 4 allows you to track your chosen exercise with over 40 exercise modes, including bike rides, weights, runs, dance, yoga and more. It provides live stats on your wrist and in the app and can also auto-detect when you're exercising. It will also track your time in heart rate zones so you’ll get ‘credit’ when you work harder: workouts in cardio or peak zones will earn you double minutes.

Sleep tracking

Automatically tracks how long you sleep each night and time spent in light, deep and REM sleep stages. You’ll be given a personalised Sleep Score, based on the quality of your previous night's sleep.

Testing the Fitbit Versa 4

The Fitbit Versa 4 arrived well-packaged and was incredibly easy to set up and link to my iPhone, ensuring that I could use the corresponding app.

Available in four different colourways, the Versa 4 has a thin, lightweight design with a soft strap that is comfortable to wear, although I found it a little awkward to secure it on my wrist at times, just because of the angle. It also came with an additional strap for users with larger wrists. The large watch colour display with a touch screen was really helpful to see the likes of stats or messages at a glance. The whole thing is also water resistant to 50m for the shower or pool. It’s overall a really stylish product that I was more than happy to wear day-to-day.

I took some time to play around with the settings and the watch face, all of which were very easy to do. You can set the display brightness, how it ‘wakes up’ (e.g. button only or button and motion), screen time out and much more. Depending on your favourite feature, you can create a shortcut (by holding the button down) for a certain app. I selected exercise as mine. You access the majority of the apps by swiping right through them until you get to the one you desire.

My primary interest in owning a Fitbit Versa 4 is the fitness functions and built-in GPS it offers. While I usually aim to work out three times a week and share walking our dog with my husband, I’m aware that working from home at a computer five days a week means that my daily activity can lack at times and I wanted something to encourage me to move. Well, the Versa 4 does exactly that, providing friendly reminders for me to take 250 steps every hour. I personally find it really easy to get lost in my work and while away the time, so this notification is just what I need to encourage me to jump up and get my steps in.

I also think the competitive element makes a difference. Both my dad and my sister own Fitbits and once adding them as friends via the app, a competition ensued to see who could get the most steps in every day. “Better get your trainers on” my dad would crow in our group chat, beating both my sister and me for the seventh day in a row. You can even ‘taunt’ friends and family members.

Rather than lumping everything under just one setting, I was pleased that you can track different modes on your Versa 4 from over 40 specific types of exercise. I enjoy different styles of workouts from HIIT to yoga to dance and it’s satisfying to me knowing that my Fitbit was aware of precisely what type of exercise I was doing, convincing me the stats it was providing were a lot more accurate. Upon finishing a workout, I was presented with BPM average, max, total time and calories.

I really liked the addition of the relax app which helped me to find moments of calm throughout stressful periods with deep breathing sessions. Following the calibration period, when prompted, I simply followed the on-screen guide (appearing as a circle on the screen) and breathed deeply. Your device vibrates when it's time to inhale and exhale.

Another app I liked was the sleep feature which automatically detects sleep and then afterwards allocates a sleep score every day, which can be viewed on the watch. In the Fitbit phone app, it further breaks down the type of sleep into awake, REM, light and deep sleep stages. According to Fitbit: "Your sleep pattern includes your time spent awake, restless, and asleep. Restless sleep indicates that you moved in your sleep, like tossing and turning. If your device detects excessive movement — enough that restful sleep would not be possible — your device records time spent awake." Your time asleep is calculated by subtracting your time spent awake and restless from your overall tracked sleep time. While I'm not entirely sure how accurate this feature actually is, I think it's a really interesting addition.

Although your phone is required to be in the vicinity to do so, if chosen to, you can be alerted to calls, texts and smartphone app notifications on the Versa 4. In an effort to reduce distractions (and time spent on my mobile), I personally chose to have these switched off but I can appreciate how useful it is when you don’t want to have your phone out.

Fitbit state that the Versa 4 battery lasts for a minimum of six days and in my month of trialling it, I found this to be accurate. Would I prefer it to last longer? Yes. But then that’s just me being lazy. Given how much the watch is doing, I can completely understand the battery length and all things considered, it’s actually rather good. Actually charging it is fairly speedy too, taking just under two hours for a full battery in my experience.

While you receive a six-month membership to Fitbit Premium which opens up a selection of perks, this is otherwise an extra cost of £7.99 per month. While this means that you can do things such as learn your sleep style and daily readiness score, it’s by no means a necessity to use the watch and I don’t personally think you’re missing out by not having it.

Final verdict

As someone who dabbles with fitness on a weekly basis, I personally find that the Fitbit Versa 4 more than meets my requirements for a smartwatch. I like how it looks, that the battery life is decent and that it's easy to use with some nifty features thrown in. I can appreciate that more hardcore fitness fanatics might require more from their smartwatch however and that the Versa 4's lack of music playback and third-party apps may mean it's a no-go, especially for those who want to leave their phone at home when going for a run, for example. This feels a bit of a step back considering the previous model, the Versa 3, could stream music via the Spotify app.

Overall, the Fitbit Versa 4 is more than suitable as a smartwatch for anyone looking for something user-friendly and I'm hopeful that following their acquisition back in 2020, Google will continue to grow the Fitbit brand with some of those missing features in their next releases.