By the time I arrived at work, it had logged my 20-minute ride, recorded the distance, even tracked my heart rate throughout the ride, estimating how many calories I'd burned and how long I'd spent in the 'fat burn' zone. The first day I wore the Alta HR, the SmartTrack feature recognized my morning bike commute. But it really shines with the stuff it does on its own.

The Fitbit app lets you manually log things like water consumption, caloric intake, and weight. As you get closer to achieving your goal, the band chimes in with an encouraging message like, 'Just 94 more steps!' Hit your daily step goal and the it lights up and buzzes with an intensity that I found far more validating that I care to admit. That's harder than it sounds! You can customize the frequency of your reminders, or change the benchmarks. Once every hour between 9 am and 6 pm, (when you're most likely to be sedentary), the band buzzes to coax 250 steps out of you. Still, the Alta HR does a nice job reminding you to get up and move. I made three, but I only ever remembered to take 10,000 steps each day because my Fitbit never reminded me about the others. The Alta HR prompts you to create three: boosting your daily step count, drinking more water, whatever strikes your fancy. In Fitbit, as in life, it's important to set #goals. You can't reply to those messages, but I found the gentle buzz of an incoming text weirdly satisfying. Pairing it with your smartphone reveals more detailed information through the Fitbit app, and brings message and call notifications to the tiny screen. Tapping the screen twice wakes it, then you tap once to toggle through the time, the step counter, heart rate, daily distance traveled, calories burned, and number of active minutes. I hesitate to call it fashionable-it's an activity tracker, people-but the sleek design all but disappears on your wrist.

The OLED display isn't much wider than your finger, and works with a variety of bands available in materials like leather, stainless steel and, of course, rose gold.

Fitbit's seventh activity tracker is the smallest yet, in keeping with the company's push to make its products feel less like computers and more like jewelry.

Fitbit hr alta