Fitbit and their terrible customer service

I own a Fitbit Charge HR. I've had it for about two years. It's nearing the end of it's life, as the strap will soon fail, and I need to think about replacing it. The most obvious choice would be the newer model, or the slightly flashier smartwatch style offering. But at the moment I think I'll move on. Here's why.

If you make gadgets, as fitbit do, you have essentially two ways to create customer loyalty. You can either make the best damn thing you can and roll out improvements to it as software development allows. Or, you can wall it off, keep make it incompatible with everything else and try to lock the customer in.

You also have two ways to sell more gadgets to your existing customers. You can make the best damn thing you can and keep it updated, rolling out improvements as software development allows. Or, you can only add new features to the new trackers, even though they're software features based in the app and nothing to do with the tracker.

It's this last point that has really annoyed me.

To make sure your tracked distance is as accurate as possible it's necessary to calibrate your stride length in the fitbit. In the Charge HR this is a manual process. With the Charge HR2 there is a feature that uses the smartphone GPS to measure how far you've walked/run, work out your stride length and update the fitbit. This is purely an app feature and there's no reason not add this functionality to the earlier fitbit devices, yet fitbit have chosen not to do that.

Even more annoying is the Charge HR doesn't have the facility to track a workout using GPS. The newer model does but, again, this is purely a smartphone app feature and nothing to do with the fitbit itself.

As far as I'm concerned fitbit is withholding features from earlier customers in the hope we will upgrade.

That stinks. So no, I probably won't upgrade. I'll look elsewhere.

Pipo X10 touchscreen

If you had a Pipo X10 and wanted to reinstall windows, you'd find some of the drivers are not part of the standard Microsoft offering. You'd do a google search and find links to a driver bundle that pretty much makes everything work. Then begins tearing your hair out at the fact the touchscreen isn't working as well as it used to, and no amount of recalibrating in windows will get it quite right.

What you need is the correct touchsettings.gt file. This goes in c:\windows\inf

I had great difficulty finding this file for the Pipo X10, but finally managed to download the entire original software build from Pipo and so present you with a link to the one file that otherwise I couldn't find.

Pipo X10 touchsetting.gt

Link updated 17/10/2021

Stagnating

Current talk in the UK news about wages had me interested. As just one example, which I don't claim is representative, my salary is pretty much the same now as it was 17 years ago.

A lot of that is the result of decisions I've made along my so called career and it could be argued I was overpaid back then, but now I'm more experienced, skilled and some might even say more mature. I work hard in a fairly skilled field and I have seen my wages stagnate in figures and therefore drop in real terms.

According to the Bank of England UK inflation calculator for my salary to have simply kept pace with inflation, equaling what I was paid at a lower end of the same field, I'd need to be paid £14,705 more.

This isn't to say that I feel terribly hard done by. We're quite comfortable, and much better off than many, though that's in part because we don't have children and have stayed in the house we bought in 1998. That in itself is interesting, because it means this perfect first-time-buyer's home has never come on the market, possibly won't for many years. That's another story...

As I say, between us my wife and I have enough. We're not just scraping by. Don't feel sorry for us. 

What really concerns me is those of us who are now middle aged, the Gen-Xers are perhaps the last to be ok. 

Assumptions that could be made by my parents generation: that wages would rise with age and experience and a decent pension would be there at the end, I don't see that for me. 

How much worse for next generation unless things change?