Most fitness trackers don’t do a very good job of tracking cycling; you don’t move your arms very much while biking, so it’s hard to measure with step-based accelerometers. Fitbit, though, just announced that they’ll be adding cycling support on its high-end Surge tracker within the month.
The Surge will use its GPS to track your ride. The bad news is that GPS sucks power like a vampire, cutting an advertised 7 day battery life to about 5 hours. On the other hand, updated phone and web apps will provide deep data about where you went and how much effort you expended doing it.
Fitbit also announced said that it would soon allow its customers to link several devices on one account, so they could use (for instance) a Surge, a Zip, and a blinged-out Flex for different activities and maintain all their data. Previously, the apps could only track data from one device: if you wore a Surge, forget about what you were doing when you out dancing with your Tory Burch edition. We wonder how many Fitbit customers actually use multiple devices — and whether this opens the door for the Fitbit app to track devices from other manufacturers…