Fitbit Ionic Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Sleek and square.

Sarah Tew/CNET

In late August, Fitbit unveiled the Ionic, an all-new, full-fledged smartwatch that clearly aimed to compete with the Apple Watch. Back then Apple was still on its Watch Series 2, but the company just last week announced the Series 3, which comes with cellular connectivity and has a lot of people excited.

The Apple Watch Series 3 starts shipping on Sept. 22. The smaller 38mm model starts at $399 with cellular and $329 without. In the UK, that’s £399 with LTE and £329 without; in Australia it’s AU$559 and AU$459. Larger 42mm models have starting prices that are a bit more expensive across the board. And, of course, you’ll need to add the cellular model to your wireless plan. In the US, that’ll cost you about $10 per month. 

The Ionic, meanwhile, is available for preorder for $300, £300 or AU$450. It’s due to arrive in customers hands’ sometime in October.

It’s unclear what the timing of the Ionic’s release will mean for its sales, but both CNET editor David Carnoy and I have been using it for several weeks and found a lot to like about it.  

Fitbit’s most feature-packed wearable

The Ionic looks sharp, is fully waterproof up to 50 meters and has a crisp, bold display, as well as GPS. It also has better battery life than the Apple Watch — around four days compared with just 18 hours for Apple — and focuses on Fitbit’s core competency: fitness tracking. However, thanks, in part, to Fitbit’s acquisition of Pebble, the Ionic will have a real app store when it ships (we’ve only tested a very limited number of apps). There’s also contactless payments and onboard music storage. 

And the list goes on: The heart rate sensor has added sensitivity for possible use as a sleep apnea detector. Embedded NFC also lurks for possible features that would let you tap the watch against a sensor, like unlocking doors perhaps. Yeah, it’s ambitious. It’s a giant fitness-watch moonshot to compete with the bleeding-edge watches on the market. Whether Fitbit can make all the pieces work perfectly remains to be seen.  

The Ionic is just one of Fitbit’s new products: There’s also a set of wireless sport headphones, called Fitbit Flyer, that are meant to be a companion to the Ionic watch. But Ionic is, all at once, a sequel to the aging GPS-equipped Fitbit Surge, which Ionic replaces, and last year’s watch-like Fitbit Blaze, which is still on sale.

After Fitbit finalizes its software in the coming weeks, we’ll post a full review, but in the meantime here’s a quick rundown of the Ionic’s key features.

Swappable bands, new design: It feels like a sleeker Fitbit Blaze, with design touches of the Fitbit Charge 2 and Alta. For what it’s worth, this is Fitbit’s first in-house-designed tracker. Perforated sport bands and leather bands snap on and off easily, and all felt nice.