Samsung's budget Galaxy Fit-e is a worthy Xiaomi Mi Band rival

Samsung can compete with the price

Galaxy Fit-e is already available on the online store of Samsung's official website in some regions, but also on Amazon at the incredible price of 39 euros, a particularly aggressive figure that positions this fitness tracker as a direct competitor to other popular devices, such as Xiaomi Mi Band 3.

The Galaxy Fit-e comes in yellow, white or black coloring. No pricing or release information has been announced for either the UK or the US markets yet. Although Samsung has previously said that it will be arriving at some point during Q2 2019.

So light it feels like you don't have it on your wrist

At a glance, it's really hard to distinguish the Galaxy Fit-e from other commercially available fitness trackers or smart bands. The light and minimal design is very common for this type of device, which manages to go particularly unnoticed in combination with any type of outfit, especially if you buy the black version (you can not say the same of the yellow one).

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Compared to its older brother, the Galaxy Fit-e does not have an AMOLED color display, but a black and white PMOLED panel of 0.74 inches, so the size not exactly huge - it's actually almost half of most fitness trackers - but is still big enough for easy reading of the time and progress made.

Apart from that, you have to say that this device is very light and, weighing only 15 grams (including the strap), you will easily forget to have it on your wrist after a few minutes. The device has no physical button and you can only interact with the interface of the Galaxy Fit-e through the touch display. It will allow you to navigate through the various screens that Samsung is calling widgets.

Good, as long as you have a Samsung smartphone

To set up and synchronize the Galaxy Fit-e you will need two apps if you use a Samsung smartphone, or four if you own a smartphone from another manufacturer.

Samsung phone owners just need to have the Galaxy Wearable and Samsung Health apps installed because the South Korean manufacturer's devices perfectly integrate the plugins and services necessary for the operation of products belonging to its ecosystem. Otherwise, you will have to install two additional components, the Galaxy Fit Plugin and the Samsung Accessory Service, without which it would be useless to own a Samsung wearable device if you use, say, a OnePlus 6.

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The first setup is very simple: just open the Galaxy Wearable app, select the Galaxy Fit-e from the list of available devices and it will automatically start searching for your fitness tracker. Once paired, you can navigate through the app's various settings and set up your Galaxy Fit-e in the best possible way.

When it comes to monitoring your physical activity, heart rate, stress and sleep, you'll have to rely on Samsung Health which, with its easy-to-understand interface, ensures that you never lose sight of a single piece of data.

On this last point, I have to congratulate Samsung because it worked really well, making this app practically equal to that of Fitbit.

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Sufficient hardware and software for the purpose

Of course, the onboard operating system is neither Tizen OS nor Wear OS, but Realtime OS, Samsung's dedicated fitness tracker operating system, which provides great support for monitoring your activity and workouts. No matter if you are pedaling, running or walking, the Galaxy Fit-e will always be able to detect what activity you are doing.

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You won't have all the functions released on the new Galaxy Watch Active, including the GPS module, but don't think that the Galaxy Fit-e lacks functionality: here too there are important functions such as stress detection and sleep monitoring, which is fantastic on a device that costs just 39 euros.

The heart rate sensor works very well and can monitor your pulse as long as you wear the Galaxy Fit-e. The Samsung Health app, a reference point for synchronizing all your progress, will be able to show you your heart rate hour by hour via a list or a graph.

Finally, Galaxy Fit-e is also water resistant up to 5ATM, so you'll never have to worry about removing it in the shower, at the beach or in the pool.

I expected better battery life, but...

Under the hood, the Galaxy Fit-e certainly doesn't have a powerful chip, but a simple 96Hz MCU Cortex M0 processor, enough to manage the fitness tracker functions, the heart rate sensor and the accelerometer.

On the other hand, I would have expected longer battery life from this chip. In fact, I was particularly surprised to have to charge the 70 mAh module every two to three days or so. Things are very different if you decide not to receive notifications from your smartphone: turning off this option from the Galaxy Wearable app will get almost a week of autonomy, a much better result if you think you can do without this feature.

Samsung Galaxy Fit-e technical specifications

Samsung Galaxy Fit-e

To device database