Samsung Galaxy Fit e price and release date
- Yours for a mere £35
- Three different colors available
- Only in the UK and India for now
If you're looking to get a Samsung Galaxy Fit e strapped to your wrist then prices start at £35 (roughly $44 / AU$63). For now the tracker isn't available in the US or Australia, so it's only UK buyers who can take advantage of the Fit e's low-cost activity tracking.
The wearable is also exclusive to Argos at the time of writing – you can't buy it direct from Samsung at the moment (although there's always eBay). Black, white and yellow are your choices of band color, and there's only one size to choose from.
At that price the Samsung Galaxy Fit e is going right up against the budget trackers on the market, though it's by no means the cheapest of these bargain basement models.
It took a while for Samsung to get the Galaxy Fit e on sale, but it's available to buy now in the UK. We haven't heard any hints from the manufacturer that a launch in the US or Australia is imminent, though India is one other location where you can pick it up.
Design and display
- Lightweight and comfortable
- Monochrome 0.74-inch screen
- Choice of three colors
Shopping at this price point, you're hardly going to expect the fitness tracker with the most luxurious feel or the most premium of materials, but the Samsung Galaxy Fit e is actually better than you might expect in the design department.
Okay it's still just a band of rubber (in either black, white or yellow), but it feels good to wear even after an hour of 5-a-side football or a morning jog up and down the canal. You're not going to be irritated by it, or even notice it's there most of the time.
The strap fastening is one of the more intelligent and robust we've seen in recent years – how the strap connects is more important than you might think in how practical a strap is – and the Galaxy Fit e can be fastened and unfastened in a second.
It's not a particularly svelte device, with the heart rate monitor and other sensors adding some bulk above your wrist, but it's not an ugly device either: it's hardly something you're going to be scrabbling to take off when you're in polite company. Put it this way – we've seen fitness wearables that look a lot worse.
If you're more of a discreet type then the black band is the one to go for. Fans of bold colors or those with a more extroverted disposition can opt for the yellow or the white, but all the functions and features are the same across the board.
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One of the features cut from the main Galaxy Fit is the wireless charging, so you get – joy of joys – another strange-looking USB charger. Plug one end into a laptop or a charging station or a mains adaptor (you don't get one in the box), and the fitness tracker rather awkwardly snaps into the other end. It's not great and the cable isn't very long but it'll do – and you are only paying £35 for this.
And really that's the bottom line when you're considering any aspect of the Samsung Galaxy Fit e, from its design to its accuracy – it's not expensive at all. The design and feel of the tracker is better than you would expect from the price, and that's all you can ask for really.
Another way you can tell the difference between the Galaxy Fit and the Galaxy Fit e is that this cheaper model goes for a monochrome rather than a color screen. It's a compromise we think is fine – you're hardly going to watch Netflix on your fitness tracker – and the display does a good job of showing the time and your essential fitness statistics.
The display measures 0.74 inches and isn't a touchscreen, though you can tap on the device to cycle between stats. It does light up when you lift your wrist and this works well and consistently – very useful when you're mid-jog.
As you would expect, it's a struggle to read the display in bright sunshine outdoors, but this isn't a problem that's exclusive to the Samsung Galaxy Fit e. Most of the time the wearable is going to give you exactly the info you need.
Overall you're unlikely to be disappointed by the fit and the finish of the Galaxy Fit e. It doesn't scream style and quality, but it's comfortable and lightweight to wear, and the choice of three colors gives you some flexibility in the design department.
Performance, fitness and features
- Track around 90 different activities
- Easy to use and mostly accurate
- Offers 5ATM water resistance
When it comes to how well the Samsung Galaxy Fit e tracks your activities, we had no complaints. It does the basics of step tracking and seemed accurate enough during our testing (closely matching the records kept by Google Fit on our phone, for example).
There does seem to be a slight delay in the tracker picking up when you start to move, and a slight tendency to overestimate steps based on our time with it, but unless you're the type of person who has to hit exactly 10,000 steps every day it's not going to be a problem. Most wearables of this type and cost feature some level of algorithmic guesswork and the Galaxy Fit e is no different.
Heart rate tracking was also satisfactorily accurate as far as we could tell, though you only get a reading while you're actually exercising unless you specifically add the heart rate widget or switch to the heart rate watch face (this will have an impact on how much battery life you get from the wearable, so bear that in mind).
As with the steps, the heart rate stats are more of a guide than a scientific log, and as long as you accept that then you'll be happy with the Galaxy Fit e. It's about a tenth of the price of an Apple Watch, after all
Steps, heart rate, calories, calendar information and even the weather forecast are your choices when it comes to widgets on the display and we found them all clear and simple to see. If you want phone notifications as well, only the most basic information is available (the app and contacts), and you can't reply or respond at all from your wrist.
At just 15 grams the Galaxy Fit e really is so light that you won't notice it's there, either during the day or during the night. We were wearing our review model for days on end without really thinking about it. If being lightweight is one of the key characteristics you're looking for in a tracker, the Galaxy Fit e ticks that box.
A total of 90 different activities can be tracked with the Galaxy Fit e and Samsung's fitness and health apps (of which more in a moment), so you're very well covered now matter how you like to stay active. There's nothing fancy here like VO2 max measurements, but then you wouldn't expect that at this price.
While we're talking about what you don't get, GPS tracking is missing, unsurprisingly for a budget fitness tracker. If you want to see where you've been on the Saturday morning Parkrun, you're going to need to take your phone with you. You don't get any kind of standalone music playback or storage here either.
Walking, running and workouts are detected automatically, but for everything else – like rowing and cycling – you need to head into the app and tell the Galaxy Fit e exactly what you're doing. Again, par for the course for a budget tracker.
Rounding out the specs of the device, its 5ATM water resistance rating means it'll survive in depths of 50 meters for 10 minutes, so you can definitely keep it on in the shower. The device will also be fine for swimming but don't take it scuba diving.
Is the Samsung Galaxy Fit e the most advanced fitness tracker on the planet? Absolutely not. Do you get a lot of features and functionality for your £35? Definitely. It does just about everything you can ask for at this price.
Sleep tracking
- Logs sleep accurately enough
- Doesn't always detect naps
If you're prepared to strap a wearable to your wrist while you're tossing and turning in bed to get a better idea of your sleeping habits, then the Samsung Galaxy Fit e has you covered here as well. Like the fitness tracking, we found the sleep tracking accurate enough as far as we could tell – certainly in terms of total hours banked.
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As for lightness or heaviness of sleep, the Galaxy Fit e attempts to tell you about this too, though it's difficult to verify. During the nights we were testing the device, there were no particularly vivid dreams or middle-of-the-night scares for us to cross-reference (at least not that we could remember).
Considering the basic innards of the Galaxy Fit e, the band is almost definitely just tracking your movements and little else, so don't expect miracles in the sleep tracking department. As a rough guide to how much you're sleeping though, it works perfectly okay.
We did test it with an afternoon nap (purely in the interests of a thorough review, of course), and found the wearable didn't pick this up at all. Perhaps it's just that we're very restless sleepers – your mileage may vary. In terms of overnight sleeping though, the Galaxy Fit e worked fine.
Battery life
- A week's use – without notifications
- No on-board battery life indicator
We reckon you'll get to a week between charges easily with the Samsung Galaxy Fit e – we certainly got there with charge to spare, though admittedly we were using a brand new device, and turned phone notifications off, and didn't often check our heart rate.
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We've already mentioned the rather awkward charging process and strap, but the benefit of having fewer features on the fitness tracker and a monochrome screen is that the battery's going to last a lot longer.
Even if you're really pushing the Galaxy Fit e in terms of activity, widgets and notification checking, you should be able to clear three or four days before you have to charge it up again. That's one of the main reasons to choose a fitness tracker over a smartwatch – you don't get the same battery anxiety.
Oh and it charges fairly rapidly too, as you would expect – the battery only has a 70 mAh capacity. One minor complaint is that you can't check the battery life from the wearable itself, and have to delve into the mobile app to see how much juice is left. This is something Samsung could improve next time around.
Apps
- Two different apps needed
- Easy and intuitive to use
Unless you own a Samsung smartphone, you're going to have to start downloading some apps for Android or iOS as soon as you get the Galaxy Fit e on your wrist – the Galaxy Wear app for syncing with the band, changing watch faces and so on, and the Samsung Health app for actually logging your statistics (the band itself stores seven days of activity).
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While Samsung has a bit of a reputation for bloated and confusing apps, Galaxy Wear and Samsung Health actually do very well at their respective jobs. Information is presented in a smart and accessible way, whether you need to dig through the details of last night's sleep or your step counts from a week ago.
The Wear app gives you plenty of options for adjusting what's shown on the display of your Galaxy Fit e, from the watch face that's used (you get a choice of six) to which apps are allowed to buzz your wrist with notifications. You can set alarms inside the Galaxy Wear app too, if you want to be alerted with a subtle vibration.
The Samsung Health app is much more comprehensive, breaking down steps, active time, calories burned, heart rate and so on (it's the same app for every Samsung wearable, so of course some features won't be utilized by the Galaxy Fit e). It's cleanly laid out, easy to get around, and useful – you can log activities manually and even record what you're eating and drinking.
Verdict
The Samsung Galaxy Fit e is a very good fitness tracker, and at just £35 something of a steal. There are wearables that offer similar functions for less, but you get an awful lot here for your money.
The apps are polished, the feature set is extensive, and to top it all off the tracker itself isn't an eyesore either. Unless you're seriously into your fitness, the step tracking, heart rate measuring, and sleep monitoring capabilities of the Galaxy Fit e will do you just fine, and it takes accurate readings too, as far as we can tell.
We were reluctant to give up the Samsung Galaxy Fit e at the end of the loan period, which is always a good sign whenever we're testing hardware. You can quibble that it doesn't do as much as some of the Fitbits or a smartwatch, but then you come back to the price.
Who's this for?
If you want decent fitness tracking at a very affordable price, then the Galaxy Fit e is going to appeal: like we said at the start, why would you pay more, really? Considering you're locked into Samsung Health for your stats and tracking though, this is going to work best if you already own a Samsung phone.
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