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Wendy asked: “I am looking at buying a Fitbit/activity tracker. Will it work, if I am not near my smart phone?”
Wendy, the tracker will work just fine without being near your smartphone, but you’ll definitely benefit from having it paired to it at some point.
If you’re thinking that you want to work out without your phone, or go for a walk without your phone, you can definitely do that and you can typically get limited information without needing to sync with your smartphone as long as you’re buying a tracker with a screen, which most of them these days have.
That means that you can usually get your steps, distance and, on the trackers that support it, even heart rate data straight from the trackers own screen.
If you happen to want graphs or data for several days, anything like that will usually require a phone or computer. Any Fitbit contests also require a phone.
Since you’re asking if you need your phone to be nearby, our guess is that you mean that sometimes you don’t have it on you, not that you never plan to sync it with your tracker. If that’s the case, don’t worry, you should be able to use your activity tracker without any issues.