Fitbit Blaze: the fitness tracker with some of Apple Watch's perks

Still trying to decide if you want a smartwatch or a Fitbit? Now you might not have to make the distinction.

Fitbit announced the Fitbit Blaze at CES, a smartwatch that builds on the capabilities traditionally found in your average Fitbit, while adding a color display, customizable watch faces and even a handful of different bands to choose from – the device slots into a range of straps.

At first glance, the Blaze looks a bit like an Apple Watch. The device has a hexagonal face and an LCD touchscreen that displays the time and other details about your movement for the day.

Where the device stands out, however, is in how it plans to help you workout. New with Blaze is its integration with FitStar, a company Fitbit acquired last year. With the integration, the smartwatch is capable of offering guided workouts. It also offers traditional smartwatch features such as notifications for calls, texts and calendar items, although you won’t be able to run other apps.

As you might expect, Blaze also tracks some of the same things previous Fitbit devices were capable of: steps, sleep and calories burned. On the tracking side of the things, the smartwatch is capable of monitoring exercises like elliptical workouts, running and tennis.

Unlike some other smartwatches that do the same, the Blaze will track those activities, and your heart rate, automatically, with no need to start or stop a workout in order to get credit for completing it. Your heart rate is tracked every five seconds throughout your day, and then every second while you’re working out, a combination that should yield accurate results without draining the battery.

Speaking of the battery, Fitbit promises five days of battery life on a single change. If it delivers, that will put it ahead of the competition when it comes to smartwatches; however, it is on par with some of the other activity trackers out there.

The Blaze starts at $199.95, and is available for pre-order today from Fitbit’s online store with the first devices set to ship in March. Additional watch bands will be sold separately, and will be priced between $30 for an elastic band and $130 for one made of stainless steel.

Unlike other smartwatches out there, when you want to change watch bands you’ll actually pop that face out of the current one rather than remove the bands.

Taking a page from Apple, with its “try-on appointments” for the Apple Watch, Best Buy locations will have the Blaze available to try out starting 20 February . The device will ultimately be available there as well as other retailers such as Amazon, Target, and Brookstone.

Markets were less impressed with Fitbit’s offering. Shares fell 11.7% on the announcement, to under $27. The response indicates concern that the device is underpriced; it costs $150 less than the cheapest Apple Watch, but has a similar feature set to the Fitbit Surge, which costs $50 more.