I carried a Fitbit, a phone app, and a cheap Letscom tracker for a month to see which counts steps accurately. The winner, and the one to avoid.
Over a month of carrying all three at once, the phone app was the most consistent step counter, the Fitbit Charge 2 was a close second and occasionally ahead, and the cheap Letscom tracker fell well behind. The reason is damning: the Letscom resets your count if you do not move enough at once, a behavior its own maker confirmed by email. On plain walking all three were accurate, but that reset flaw makes the budget option hard to recommend.
Verdict: phone app wins, Fitbit a close secondAs part of a new year's focus on my health, I wanted a wearable pedometer. I had been tracking steps with the Samsung Health app on my S9 for most of a year, but I wanted something that did not require pulling out my phone, or even having it on me, to check steps or heart rate, which is a real hassle when you are playing tennis.
Fitbits are expensive, so I first looked for a cheaper alternative and settled on the Letscom Fitness Tracker HR, one of many near-identical budget wearables. On paper it looked great: thousands of rave reviews, essentially the same features as a Fitbit, and a low price. I will call it the LFT from here on. For the money the hardware is not bad, apart from the awkward way you take it apart to charge it. The real problem showed up in use: the step readings were consistently lower than expected, for a reason I will get to.
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When the LFT's numbers looked off against the Samsung app, I wondered how both compared to the real thing, so I paid the luxury price for a Fitbit Charge 2 purely to make it a three-way test. The setup was simple: carry all three every day for over a month. I have a cubicle job on weekdays, a warehouse job on weekends, take regular walks, and play tennis, so I covered most of the common step-tracking scenarios. I recorded readings twice a day, at lunch and end of day. Both wearables ran standalone (no phone connection), on the latest firmware, with my height entered and the default stride length.
I ended up with 70 records across 35 days. For each record I gave the highest of the three 100 percent and scored the others against it, then averaged daily, then weekly, then overall. The result was not surprising: the LFT lagged, sometimes far behind. The app and the Fitbit mostly kept pace, with the Fitbit even edging ahead enough to win a full week here and there.
The biggest reason for the LFT's poor showing is a bizarre quirk of its tracking: if you do not travel more than about 20 steps at a time, it either does not record those steps or logs a few and then resets to the previous count. Someone actually programmed "if fewer than 20 steps, reset the count," which is baffling. Just keep counting. This behavior was so strange that I emailed the manufacturer, and they confirmed it is the standard operating procedure for the device, even noting it might reset up to 100 steps. They offered a refund or replacement, but why swap it for another that does the same thing by design? Digging into other reviews, plenty of owners report the same, and it is not isolated: many budget trackers run the same software.
In other words, it is close to useless for anyone on their feet in a smaller space all day: teachers, nurses, dentists, cafe and restaurant workers. They could be moving constantly and the device would save almost nothing. That is exactly what happened to me on a day at home, pottering around a small house, where the LFT posted its worst daily result of the whole month.
To be fair to the LFT, I ran a controlled test. At my weekday job I walk laps around the building, a parking loop I counted at 576 steps, and I recorded all three at the start and end of four laps with a GoPro rolling. The result: all three were basically spot on, none drifting more than 1 percent. For steady, uninterrupted walking, the cheap tracker is perfectly accurate. If it were not for the resetting flaw I could even recommend it over the Fitbit on price, but the old saying holds: you get what you pay for.
A couple of other observations. On tennis days the wearables catch up to the app, with the Fitbit even leading, because wrist devices infer steps largely from arm movement, and tennis is all arms. That same principle cost the app at my warehouse job, where I walk a lot but also stand and move product up and down shelves. It also gives the phone an edge overall, since it can lean on GPS and other sensors for more consistent counts, and consistency wins the race.
Credit where due: the LFT held its charge about twice as long as the Fitbit, roughly 10 days versus 5, though that is little comfort given the resetting issue. A firmware update could fix the reset behavior, and that is all it would take. My small gripes with the Fitbit were the lack of a charge indicator (you only learn it is low when it warns you 24 hours out, which is still plenty of time) and its slightly clunky proprietary charging cable.
On steady, known-distance walking it was within 1 percent of a Fitbit and a phone, but its counter resets if you move fewer than about 20 steps at a time, so it badly undercounts anyone on their feet in a small area.
Yes. The manufacturer confirmed by email that it resets counts under a threshold by design, sometimes up to 100 steps, and many other cheap trackers use the same software.
In a month-long test the phone app was the most consistent thanks to GPS and extra sensors, with the Fitbit Charge 2 a close second and occasionally ahead.
Wrist wearables largely infer steps from arm movement, so they can over-count during arm-heavy activity like tennis and under-count when you are on your feet but not swinging your arms.
For pure accuracy the phone app won and the Fitbit was a strong dedicated wearable. The cheap Letscom is hard to recommend because of the resetting flaw, despite its low price and long battery life.
Come to your own conclusion, but for me the phone app wins on consistency, the Fitbit is a close second and the better choice if you want a standalone wearable, and you already know where the LFT lands. Steady walkers may never notice the reset issue, but anyone who moves in short bursts should steer clear of the cheap trackers that behave this way.