The Ionic also features a unibody design made from aerospace-grade aluminum and a " spherical glass " screen . The surface of the display is slightly curved , but I can barely tell that it is . Those who were hoping for a round screen will be disappointed ; the Ionic is as blockish as the rest of Fitbit ' s devices . In fact , its rectangular panel , flanked by lugs that slope away from the angular watch face , will remind you of the hexagonal design of the Blaze -- Fitbit ' s previous smartwatch wannabe .
I wish the Ionic had a round face , but its gorgeous 1.42-inch , 348 x 250 screen makes up for my disappointment . This is the best display I ' ve seen on a smartwatch yet , and it provides a sumptuous canvas for FitbitOS . Full-color pictures of people working out look vibrant and clear , while words superimposed on these images are crisp . My favorite thing about the screen , though , has to be its brightness ( 1,000 nits ), which makes it easy to read even in harsh sunlight .
As the company ' s first fully fledged app-based platform , FitbitOS is impressively mature , although that is probably thanks to the experience of the Pebble team , which Fitbit acquired this year . You ' ll get notifications from your phone for calls , messages and basically any app that can push alerts . I activated those from Gmail , Slack and Hangouts , and they all came through during my testing . Like most smartwatches , the Ionic would vibrate briefly when it received a message , and a preview would pop up on the screen for a few seconds after I lifted my arm .
Swiping up from the home screen reveals accumulated alerts , while swiping left leads to the apps . There is a small selection at launch , including utilities like Alarm , Weather , Timer and Wallet , as well as third-party offerings like Starbucks , Strava and Pandora . Fitbit expects this list to grow in number by the time the watches ship . To encourage developers to create apps for FitbitOS , the company is also launching Fitbit Studio , a web-based platform for coding . The SDK for making Fitbit apps is also based on popular , easy-tolearn standards like JavaScript and SVG .
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