Review: Fitbit Ace LTE

As an adult, we’ve all become inured to fitness tracker gamification—all the funny little incentives to up your step count and get moving. It’s wild to see a child experience fitness gamification for the first time, especially since most children have too much energy to begin with.

The Ace LTE, Fitbit’s new smartwatch for kids, incentivizes children between the ages of 7 and 14 to wear their combination fitness tracker, location sharer, and communication device with a proprietary games studio called Fitbit Arcade. The child can unlock activity-based games with a certain number of steps, and it’s time-limited, so they can play for only a few minutes at a time.

It also has an eSIM with built-in LTE connectivity, so you and your child can text and call each other, and you can locate them in Google Maps. Tap to Pay via Google Wallet is also coming soon. This watch solves a lot of problems for me and my elementary-school-aged children. However, I’m not sure that Google’s beta testers have adequately prepared their software engineers for my two kids, who, if they see that they need 1,500 more steps to unlock a game, will sprint around the house at top speed for 20 minutes until they get them.

Mild or Spicy Sauce

The Ace LTE smartwatch comes in two colorways: Spicy Pebble and Mild Pebble. Both have a stainless steel case with plastic buttons and a polyester woven strap with a plastic clasp. It’s about 41 by 45 mm across—so, it’s sizable, but nothing that my 7-year-old and 9-year-old feel is unwieldy. The only time my son wants to take it off is when he’s playing violin. It’s a Fitbit, so it works with both Android and Apple phones.

Photograph: Adrienne So

It has a 5 ATM rating, which means it can withstand the pressure exerted by 50 meters of water. However, while it offers some protection, it doesn't have a dustproof rating. The screen is made from Corning Gorilla Glass 3 with an OLED panel that is plenty bright enough to see in natural daylight. It also comes with a protective plastic bumper; I asked my daughter whether she wanted to take it off so her watch would look a little more grown-up, and she said no.

It may be a child’s smartwatch, but it is a Fitbit, and it does have the full suite of sensors—an accelerometer, optical heart rate sensor, magnetometer, ambient light sensor, and gyroscope. Multiple people have asked me, incredulously, whether I think it’s accurate when it says that my son is racking up between 16,000 to 20,000 steps a day. All I have to say is, you wouldn’t ask me that question if you could see him on our trampoline.

At the end of a full day—from 6:30 am to around 7:30 pm for my kids—the battery is down to around 13 or 20 percent, which is a little less than the 16-plus hours that Google advertises, but it works for us. Every night, I put it on the charger after they go to bed at 8 pm, and they’re always fully charged by the time I go to bed at around 10 pm.

Photograph: Adrienne So

To use the watch, you have to subscribe to Ace Pass ($10 per month), which is both the subscription service for Fitbit Arcade and a data plan. It uses GPS positioning and built-in 4G LTE connectivity. You don’t have to add a cell line to your phone plan to keep it connected.

We are an Apple family, and it does take a little bit longer to locate my kids via the Ace versus pinging my husband’s location on his phone or Apple Watch on Find My. However, it’s not a distressingly long period and it works. In addition to text messaging, it has a built-in microphone and speaker that work quite well for calls—not quite as good as the Apple Watch, but better than a Garmin.

Calls and texts work through the Fitbit Ace app, but since I have notifications from the app on my phone, I don't miss them (sometimes to my chagrin—you can get only so many poop emoji texts in one day before it stops being funny). You, the parent, must add trusted contacts via the app, and those contacts must also download the Fitbit Ace app. I cannot group chat, sadly.

Run Around

Many parents are anxious about giving their children a smart device. I empathize with the longing for a simpler time, but with vigilance, a smart device has opened my children up to the world, not shut them away from it. My anxious first-grader, whom I used to have to accompany to all birthday parties and field trips, goes by himself now that he can text me if he feels bad. My third-grader walks and bikes to her friends’ houses alone, learning independence, resilience, and how to check street signs along the way.

It’s important not to mistake correlation for causation. Are kids today anxious and less active because they have smartphones? Or is it because parents are busier, and not everyone lives in enclaves where the parents all know each other and are usually at home, and where it’s easy for children to travel between the park, school, and each other’s houses?

But I digress. We used to use Apple Watches for this purpose, but even with Family Setup, Apple Watches are retooled grown-up devices for children. As such, they’re a little more confusing to use. Parental controls can be wonky. My kids also didn’t want to wear them every day. I added their watches to my cell phone plan but they use them mainly as walkie-talkies and never charge them.

Photograph: Adrienne So

The Ace is much easier to use. Safety-wise, Google does not take your children’s health data as Apple does with an Apple Watch for research; it deletes location history after 24 hours and all health data after 30 days. It also includes other safety features—for example, you can turn off Location Accuracy, which leverages Google’s Find My network to ping other devices and wireless signals around your child to pinpoint their location more accurately.

At $230, it's expensive for a kids' smartwatch, but not as expensive as an Apple Watch. The game options are also surprisingly alluring. Taking steps not only unlocks games but also helps you outfit your Eejie and keep it healthy. An Eejie is Fitbit's proprietary personalized character that I can describe only as your Fitbit Tamagotchi. My kids got their Aces and immediately friended each other. In addition to living in bedrooms next to each other, their Eejies now live in adjoining houses in Bit Valley, where the bickering can continue in a virtual space as well as in real life.

The games are appealing and surprisingly fun, if weird. My daughter’s favorite is the fishing game, Smokey Lake, while my son’s is Kaiju Golf; it is strange to happen on them in the living room, pantomiming sports. While you can lock down the games during the day with the built-in School Time mode, I count this as a misstep on the part of the developers; since you can unlock games by increasing your step count, all my children do is … run around more. Oh, to be 7 years old and able to get in 1,600 steps with a quick half-hour on the trampoline! They play on their watches more than I expected and I had to take them away during dinner.

Photograph: Adrienne So

The other possible misstep is that kids change so rapidly during this time. My kids are at the exact perfect ages for this device—they can read, they like games, and they’re more independent. But they’re also, you know, still kids. It’s aimed at children up to age 14, but my 9-year-old has already expressed skepticism about how childlike it looks. An Apple Watch would be able to grow with them more easily.

My kids really like the Ace. They wake up every morning, pick them up off the charger, and put them on, as automatically as my husband or I put on our smartwatches, which I am OK with because they’re not (always) using them to play. Most importantly, other parents who have kids in soccer practice and bassoon lessons have also asked whether they should get one. The Ace solves a real problem for many working parents. I have a feeling other kids may be joining mine in Bit Valley and on the real sidewalks around our houses very soon.