Get it while you can: Our favorite fitness tracker drops under $100 on Black Friday

With Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday just around the corner, this is an excellent time to score a hefty discount on a fitness tracker or smartwatch. The two categories are mixing a bit as smartwatches become more powerful for fitness tracking. Fitness-focused wearables often come with basic features like mobile payment support and phone notifications. However, you can still narrow the field by keeping your own needs in mind.

If you’re looking for a watch that syncs seamlessly with your smartphone and has tons of apps, extensive notifications, camera controls, and the like, then you’ll probably want to stick with a smartwatch from the same manufacturer that makes your phone. If you’re interested in fitness metrics and training hard for an upcoming event like a triathlon, you might prefer a model from a sports brand like Garmin or Polar. If you just want to get active and move more, you can save money and get a very simple tracker.

I test and evaluate dozens of wearables every year based on factors such as accuracy, performance, and value. In fact, I’m wearing two and collecting data on them as I write this story. (Check out the details of our testing process here.) These are my favorite Black Friday deals on smartwatches and fitness trackers so far.

Our favorite fitness tracker falls under $100

The Fitbit Charge 6, our Editors’ Choice for fitness trackers, is on sale for 38% off for Black Friday. If you don’t need a new watch and just want great exercise tracking with a surprisingly extensive selection of apps and lifestyle features, grab the Charge 6 now.

The Charge 6 syncs with Fitbit’s well-designed app for Android and iOS, so you can see graphs of your workout data over time. You can use it to track 40 different types of activities and monitor pace, calories, heart rate, distance, duration, steps and more. It can even send heart rate data to fitness devices via Bluetooth for better visibility. If you want to get active in the new year, the Charge 6 can be an informative companion on your way.

Get over $100 off a top-rated Garmin watch

If you’re looking for a fitness-focused smartwatch, the Garmin Vivoactive 5 is one of our favorites and was 36% off on Black Friday. As a watch, the Vivoactive 5 supports notifications, mobile payments, weather reports and integrated music storage. It also works with iOS and Android and has a battery life of 11 days. On the fitness side, it offers detailed and accurate tracking of exercise, sleep and stress, complete with Garmin’s useful Body Battery metric, which dynamically displays your energy levels throughout the day.

Over 30% off a WearOS smartwatch with multi-day battery life

With most smartwatches, you need to find time to charge them every day or every other day at most. The OnePlus Watch 2 bucks this trend as a full-featured Wear OS watch that lasts 69 hours on a charge with the always-on display enabled. You can get this durable wearable with a significant 33% discount on Black Friday.

The OnePlus Watch 2 only works with Android phones, but it doesn’t limit many features to OnePlus models specifically. It’s a good choice if you’re looking for a feature-rich smartwatch with powerful workout and sleep tracking and the battery life of a fitness tracker.

Choose a one-year Galaxy Watch and save big

Samsung makes the most popular Android-based smartwatches for a reason. On Black Friday, you can get the 40mm Galaxy Watch 6 for 46% off or the 44mm model for 39% off.

Yes, the Galaxy Watch 6 is a year old, but it was recently updated to the latest Samsung software, including Galaxy AI health information and sleep apnea detection, so the differences between this model and the newer Galaxy Watch 7 are now minimal. It offers excellent app variety and features, as well as accurate health and sleep tracking. You can even use the watch to measure your body composition similar to a smart scale and track your snoring.

Unlike the OnePlus Watch 2, the Galaxy Watch 6 retains many of its best features for its first-party phones, but is a good upgrade to grab if you have a Samsung phone and need a new wearable.

Looking for more top-notch tech on sale this weekend? Be sure to visit our Black Friday hub for current deals on the products you want most.

The best Black Friday deals for PCMag’s Best of the Year picks

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About Andrew Gebhart

Senior Analyst, Smart Home and Wearables

I’m PCMag’s lead analyst for smart home and wearable devices. I’ve been writing about technology professionally for almost a decade and have been studying it for much longer. Before joining PCMag, I created instructional videos for an electronics store called Abt Electronics in Illinois, and before that I covered the smart home market for CNET for eight years.

I engage in many forms of nerdiness in my personal life. I am an avid board gamer and video gamer. I love fantasy football, which I consider to be a combination of role-playing games and sports. Plus, I can talk to you for hours about craft beer and am personally on a quest to do a beer tour at every microbrewery in my hometown of Chicago.

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