Fitbit is having another crack at taking on the likes of Apple, Garmin, and LG with its newly unveiled Ionic smartwatch. The wearable packs in a bunch of tracking sensors, plus some useful extras like mobile payments, to make it the most advanced device yet to appear from the Fitbit stable.

Fitbit is describing the Ionic as the company's "first ever smartwatch," which we find a little confusing as it launched the Fitbit Blaze last year, another device that straps around the wrist to tell the time and monitor various health and fitness metrics. Is that not also what you would describe as a smartwatch?

Perhaps Fitbit just wants us to forget the Blaze ever happened, and whatever the nomenclature, the Ionic looks like being an upgrade in every department. What does distinguish it from its predecessor is support for third-party apps, so developers outside of Fitbit can build their own apps for the device. 

Eoin Treacy's view

For some people wearing a belt is enough to monitor personal shape and size. I’m not that fortunate and personally having a wrist-mounted fitness tracker twinned with a calorie counting mobile phone app has been a recipe for keeping me on a successful fitness and dietary regime. 

I bought a Fitbit Blaze for Mrs. Treacy because it has the option to change wristbands which was necessary to get around her silicon allergy. It lasted about three weeks before dying. The build quality left a lot to be desired. On the other hand, I have been wearing a Garmin Vivosmart HR all year and it is still going strong. 

There are many positive features that accompany wrist-mounted heart rate tracking but there are some serious issues which I have not seen any product overcome. The green laser is optimised to take readings from your blood flow when you are not holding anything in your hand. That works best for walking and running. However, if you play tennis, lift weights, row, engage in HIIT training or indeed sweat profusely it doesn’t work. I do all those so the heart rate function on my Vivoactive is basically useless when I work out. I believe it’s also part of the reason Apple demurred from offering more fitness related apps with its smart watch. I suspect the company that can come up with a seamless fix for this problem with take the mantle of leader in the smartwatch sector. 

Personally, the workaround I use is to don a chest-mounted heart rate strap that twins with my Vivosmart hr during workouts to get a reliable reading.  

Garmin has been ranging with a mild upward bias for a year and is testing the region of the trend mean once more. It needs to hold the $50 if potential for continued higher to lateral ranging is to be given the benefit of the doubt.

Fitbit collapsed in 2016 and has been drifting in 2017. The share has firmed over the last week to retest the $6 but needs to sustain a move above that level to confirm a return to demand dominance beyond the short term. 

Fitbit is one of several new companies that collapsed following initial surges of enthusiasm. However base formation development is increasingly evident and they represent a potentially interesting group to monitor for signs of returns to demand dominance. 

GoPro, Yelp, Twitter, TripAdvisor and Etsy all share similar patterns. No doubt they collapsed for non-trivial reasons but their patterns suggest a lot of the bad news is already in the price.