Perfectly priced fitness tracker for your kids

These days, it’s not hard to find a good fitness tracker. With everything from smart rings to the best smartwatches, it’s easy to find one with just the right features and price to fit your needs. One of the best things about them is how simple they are to use, which makes them great for active kids wanting to learn more about their health or parents wishing to ease their younglings into a smartwatch. The Vigor 2 from Biggerfive is the second kid-focused fitness tracker from the brand, and you couldn’t really ask for more for what you’re getting.

Pricing and availability

The Vigor 2 starts at $31 for the standard size, and there’s a large option for a couple of dollars more. That’s not too bad a price for what you get, but it can add up quickly if you have multiple kids. There are a few different color options, so your child can pick the one they like. Both sizes are currently available from Biggerfive’s website, and I believe only the standard size is on Amazon for $29. I’ve also seen it at Walmart for as low as $26 at the time of writing.

What’s good about the Biggerfive Vigor 2?

The best part of the Vigor 2 is its simplicity. It’s straightforward and easy to operate via the single capacitive button on the bottom of the display. It doesn’t try to be more than what it is – a simple tracker for the most basic health and fitness data. And that’s exactly what you want in something designed for kids. There’s not much to mess with; they’ll pick up on it immediately.

The setup process is very simple, too. Download the Biggerfive app to your smartphone of choice, and the Vigor 2 can be paired in a matter of minutes. You’ll need to create a profile for the child using it, and if you get multiple bands for different kiddos, you can manage all the devices and profiles within the same app, which is much easier than managing multiple Apple Watches, per se. I also really like that all the settings for the band live within the app instead of on the band itself, giving parents full control over the band.

The app also allows you to manage the different sports you want to track. By default, it will track walking, running, biking, and hiking, but you can also add things like soccer, basketball, tennis, and open workouts.

Parents have granular control over the band settings and their child’s health data

Once everything is set up in the app, your child can use the tracker to start and stop workouts and check in on their step count and heart rate throughout the day. At night, a sleep tracking feature shows deep sleep, light sleep, and awake time. I found the sleep tracking to be pretty accurate, which was nice. There’s also a stopwatch and alarm clock feature for times when your child might want to use those.

Workouts can be started and stopped by long pressing the button so kids don’t need to be tethered to a phone to control their workouts. They can also check their step count and heart rate while away from the phone as well, so that’s nice. And again, all the health data lives back on your phone, so only you can access your child’s health data. It’s also nice that you can only save your child’s health data locally to the phone instead of a Biggerfive cloud account, but this option is not on by default.

It’s also fun that Biggerfive has things like a weekly health report so your child can see their progress and medals they can earn to reward them for their hard work.

I was also happy with the way the band fit. It was comfortable to wear for days at a time and easy to buckle. The tracker itself fits into the band, so it’s one complete piece, and you can purchase additional colors from Biggerfive. I couldn’t find out if it’s compatible with any other bands, but I’ve reached out to the company and will update this article if they respond.

Lastly, the Vigor 2’s battery life is pretty stellar. The company advertises anywhere from 5-7 days of use, and I would say that’s probably accurate. Of course, that will vary depending on how active your child is and how often they’re using it to track workouts, but it’s definitely close to that. Charging time is about 1.5-2 hours for a full charge, so just keep that in mind.

What’s not good about the Biggerfive Vigor 2?

There’s certainly a lot to like about the Vigor 2, but compromises always have to be made to keep the price low. For starters, the display doesn’t get very bright, which makes it tricky to see in sunlight. The haptic feedback is pretty bad, and the single capacitive button can be a tad finicky at times. But none of this is really surprising for a $30, child-focused fitness tracker.

Also, in my time with it, I found it less accurate than a high-quality fitness tracker, more specifically, when compared to something like the Apple Watch. For example, I found the distance to be up to half a mile off when directly compared, and sometimes, my step counts differed by hundreds of steps between the two devices.

As this is designed for children, I’m less inclined to be upset about it (and less surprised, honestly). If your child is a serious athlete, you’ve likely invested in a better fitness tracker like the Xiaomi Smart Band 8. For most other parents — myself included — I would use this more to help my child learn more about health and fitness, so the accuracy is a bit less important.

That doesn’t mean the faults are any less annoying. One of the biggest annoyances is that the band doesn’t appear to push any data to the app automatically. The only way I could get any data to sync was by opening the app and syncing it manually.

It may not be a deal breaker, but it’s something to note. Also, the only way to get a map of your workout is to start the workout from your phone instead of the band. Even when I had my phone in my pocket, unless I started the workout from my phone itself, I didn’t get a map of it. Weird.

As with any health data (and really any data at all when it comes to your child), you always want to be thinking about privacy. For instance, the Vigor 2 offers menstrual cycle tracking, which could help adolescent wearers better understand their health as they navigate new facets of it. But that might not be something you want recorded by a company you know nothing about. Again, you can turn off the cloud syncing feature, so that’s good.

It was also annoying that a device marketed and sold in the US had the metric unit settings loaded by default. Changing these to the US system is possible, but you have to dig through the app settings to do it. Again, this wouldn’t be too big of a deal if it were meant for adults. However, a child might get confused and not know what to do.

Should you buy the Biggerfive Vigor 2?

If you’re looking for a fun and inexpensive way to help your kids get excited about being active while learning more about health and fitness, the Vigor 2 is easy to recommend. It gives your child easy access to workouts and basic health data while giving parents granular control and visibility into their health data.

It’s also a helpful device for easing your child into the world of wearable, connected technology. While something like an Apple Watch or Galaxy Wear device is probably too much for a younger child, a simple fitness tracker like the Vigor 2 can be a great way to teach them about properly managing and using technology.