Discussions are apparently still ongoing
Fitbit’s first smartwatch goes on sale worldwide on 1 October (that’s this Sunday), but it looks like if you live outside of the US it’s going to be missing a pretty big feature.
When the Ionic was announced back in August it promised to offer offline music playback from music service Pandora. The only problem with Pandora is that it’s only available Stateside, which means Fitbit needed to sew up a music service partner for everybody else. Except it seems that has not happened yet.
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Fitbit told Wareable that, as of right now, a European partnership was something it was “still exploring”, but that it did not have any further details to share.
So Fitbit hasn’t nailed a service down yet, which is surely going to disappoint prospective Ionic owners who haven’t yet realised this is the case. With just a couple of days to go until launch, it seems highly unlikely it will secure a partner in time.
So what could be causing the hold up? Well it’s most likely to do with the selection of services that are likely to be on offer. If you believe the speculation, a potential deal with Spotify broke down in the early stages of development of the Ionic. Spotify also just introduced the very same feature for Samsung’s smartwatches and fitness trackers.
It seems unlikely that Google Play Music or Amazon Music could be viable options as they’ll be strongly tied to the respective company’s own tech platforms, so that leaves maybe Deezer or Tidal (surely not). Basically, there’s doesn’t appear to be a lot of great options out there.
Fitbit does of course offer the ability to transfer your own music to the Ionic, through PC or Mac software and not via the smartphone app. Hopefully it’s something that does get sorted in the near future, but for the short term it looks like Ionic users outside of the US are going to have to get used to not having this Ionic feature in their lives.
