Fitbit Charge 4 wearable update adds Dynamic GPS and Smart Wake alarm

By Brittany Roston/

Fitbit has released an update for its Charge 4 smartwatch, adding new features that improve its usefulness as a wake-up device while also improving battery life. The changes arrive in update v1.96.29. With this, users will be able to get their watch to wake them up at the ideal time, avoiding alarms that go off during deep sleep. As well, GPS usage has been improved to preserve battery life.

The Fitbit Charge 4 is one of the company's most advanced fitness trackers, offering built-in GPS, the ability to monitor heart rate, a large display, support for Spotify, and more. The latest firmware update brings two new features: Dynamic GPS and Smart Wake. The first is quite obviously related to GPS while the latter is a new alarm type.

Smart Wake is a feature also available on the Fitbit Ionic and Fitbit Versa series; rather than having the alarm go off at a specific time, the wearable will potentially wake you up at a more ideal time up to 30 minutes before the scheduled alarm. This feature aims to avoid waking the user up while they are in deep sleep, causing them to have a bad start to the day.

If a more ideal time isn't identified before the alarm, it will simply go off at its usual time, according to Fitbit. The update also brings the aforementioned Dynamic GPS, which is a feature in which the watch will use one's phone if it is nearby, using that GPS sensor instead of the one built into the watch to help save battery life.

Other smaller changes introduced by this update include the ability to adjust how long the wearable's screen stays on, plus users can now see the date when the device was activated using the Fitbit app. Other changes include general improvements and bug fixes.

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