Despite looming Google acquisition, Fitbit launches Charge 4 tracker

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  The Fitbit Charge 4. [credit: Fitbit ]

Fitbit is still out there living its life and launching products despite a looming acquisition by Google that could upend the entire company any month now. Today Fitbit announced the Charge 4, the latest in its line of Charge devices that kind of sit at the halfway point between a smartwatch and a basic fitness tracker. The Charge 4 has the same body as the Charge 3, just with updated internals.

You won't be installing apps or playing music on it anytime soon, but it can sync to your smartphone and show notifications on the greyscale OLED touch screen. The device is mostly focused on fitness features with exercise recognition, an activity dashboard, move reminders, and tracking of just about everything, including your general activity, your heart rate, and sleep tracking.

Some big additions to the Charge 4 seemed designed to let you leave your smartphone at home. The first is an internal GPS for location tracking, which will let you log runs without a phone, but it will also severely cut down on the battery life. Fitbit claims the Charge 4 will last up to seven days if you don't turn on GPS, but turning on the GPS will cut that time down to five hours, a stunning 97 percent decrease in battery life. To go along with the new location tracking, there are now seven GPS-based exercise modes. Sync the device to the Fitbit app and you'll see a new "GPS-powered heat map" showing where your toughest workouts were.

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