We’re dangerously close to Black Friday now, and while in year’s prior it’s felt like a fool’s game to predict what devices are likely to see price cuts, we don’t actually have to wait anymore.

That’s because a bunch of great fitness trackers are seeing discounts across big brands like Garmin, Samsung, and even the latest Apple Watch Ultra 4 (which only launched in September of this year).

We’ve rounded up our picks of the bunch so far, but as you can imagine, we expect more deals to come. Still, if you want to skip the queues and delivery timelines, these are well worth a look.

The best pre-Black Friday fitness tracker deals

Google Fitbit Charge 6

The Google Fitbit Charge 6 is able to sync to supported gym equipment, with ECG and EDA included, and 41 exercise modes. It also includes a 6-month free trial of Fitbit Premium, which is an ideal way to get started with your fitness journey since it folds mindfulness, diet, and training information into one place.

Right now, you can save 16% at Amazon, bringing it from $159.95 down to $134.99.

Garmin vívoactive 5

The first of two Garmin models on this list, the Vívoactive 5 is a few years old, but is still a four-star fitness tracker.

The AMOLED display remains bright and easy-to-read, and while the lack of buttons might make controlling it a light challenge for relative newcomers to fitness tracking (or anyone with sweaty hands), it packs on-watch music streaming so you can leave the phone at home.

With 30 workout profiles and a bunch of metric tracking (including swimming and golf), it’s in many ways a jack-of-all-trades.

A much cheaper alternative to the pricier Forerunner or Fenix models that include Training Readiness and better battery life, Best Buy currently has the vívoactive 5 at $169.99 in its holiday deals — an $80 discount from the standard price.

Samsung Galaxy Watch8

It’s not often we call a smartwatch “a triumph”, but that’s exactly what happened with the Samsung Galaxy Watch8 when we reviewed it last year — and awarded it 4.5 stars.

After some relatively minor updates, this felt like the big one – despite being 11% slimmer than the prior model. While we’d have liked faster charging and a better battery life, having Gemini on your wrist makes you much more likely to use it in the real world, and Samsung has outdone itself with the running metrics on offer.

A smartwatch that’s a cut above most fitness trackers, the Samsung Galaxy Watch8 is $259.99 at Target, reduced by $90 now that the Samsung Galaxy Watch 9 has been released.

Garmin Venu 3S

Another Garmin entry, the Venu 3S is from 2023 and a bit long in the tooth, but it’s still very much worth a look for anyone looking to reach fitness goals. We awarded it 4.5 stars in our review back at release, and called it “an ideal lifestyle smartwatch and fitness tracker blend.” It uses components such as the Elevate V5 heart rate sensor, which Garmins are still equipped with today.

It really does toe the line between functionality, features, and convenience, balancing the various options of a smartwatch with the battery life and fitness tracking capabilities of, well, a fitness tracker. Like its sequel, the Venu 4 (our best Garmin watch overall) it's an ideal 'goldilocks' fitness tracker for people who want it all.

Three years on, the AMOLED display looks great, heart rate data remains accurate, and sleep tracking is still excellent. You can save $90 at Best Buy right now, with the Stainless Steel and French Gray colorway down to $359.99.

Apple Watch Ultra 4

Oh boy, this is the big one. We loved the Apple Watch Ultra 4 when it launched earlier this year, with the latest model of Apple’s rugged wearable earning 4.5 stars from us in our full review.

Imagine our surprise, then, to see Amazon lopping $100 off the latest model, bringing it from $799 to $699. It’s still pricey, sure, but you’re getting a lot of improvements for your money - particularly if you’re coming from an older Apple Watch Ultra.

To be clear, there’s little to no point in picking one up if you don’t have an iPhone to pair it with, but if you do, you’ll see performance gains with the S11 chip, and Apple has managed to eke out a little more battery life, too, bringing it up to 50 hours in total.

Perhaps the biggest draw is the Readiness Score, which offers Apple’s take on Fitbit’s Daily Readiness Score with no premium membership required. Having your watch tell you when it’s good to push on, or when you need a rest, could have a huge impact on long-term training and help you avoid injury.

Not in the US? Check out the best pre-Black Friday deals on those smartwatches below:

Tech companies continue to shoehorn AI into their product and services, whether it’s justified or not. Within fitness and health tech, we have more AI coaches and advisors than we can juggle — from Google’s Health Coach to Strava’s Athlete Intelligence — and AI interpretations of our stats, that often look suspiciously like the technology we had years ago, just with an LLM flair.

But the shareholders love it and it works to upsell customers, so the game continues. Garmin, however, has been pretty careful about how it has employed the term, and how it has actually used the tech to ‘enhance’ its best Garmin watches and its Garmin Connect+ platform. From a dig into the Garmin website, you’ll mostly only see the term AI attached to one feature: Connect+’s Active Intelligence, which it describes as 'AI-powered'.

Active Intelligence is designed to offer LLM-style feedback and advice within the Connect app on your phone. The pitch is that as the app gets to know you, the insights will become ‘tailored to you and your goals’, according to Garmin.

Garmin is a fairly careful, perhaps conservative, company among its peers. And I imagine there may have been a feeling it couldn’t not jump on this AI bandwagon, given wider industry trends. I asked Garmin COO Brad Trenkle how he sees AI’s role within the company.

“I think because Garmin is a very engineering-focused company, we tend to be very pragmatic in all of our decision making,” says Trenkle. “That has led us to be very thoughtful and discerning about our use of AI.

“One of the key tenets of how we've implemented AI across the company, not just in product but even internally in our own processes, is that any application of AI needs to keep a very keen sense of authenticity.”

It’s an interesting take, when AI front-ends within health and fitness platforms often purport or appear to want to give apps a more relatable or human edge — and seem faker or sycophantic as a result.

TrainingPeaks in the distance

Garmin remains keen to emphasize it’s a human-first company, as proved by the company’s most recent major acquisition, TrainingPeaks, in July.

TrainingPeaks does use some AI-based technologies in its platform but, fundamentally, it’s about matching an athlete (or schlub aspiring to be one) with the knowledge and expertise of a real, actual expert person. This is a platform made for coaches as much as athletes, a business model completely at odds with the current trend of simply getting ChatGPT or Claude to work up a training plan for you.

“We also have taken approaches that we think will give customers choice,” says Trenkle on the buy-out.

“Our recent acquisition of TrainingPeaks is an opportunity for us to make sure consumers who want to be able to engage with a human coach can do so through the TrainingPeaks platform. So we want to make sure that we meet customers where they are.”

Garmin is dabbling on both sides. Connect+’s controversial-at-launch Active Intelligence is a take on the flavor-of-the-month application of AI, using LLM tech to spit out easily intelligible summaries so folks don’t have to spend any mental energy on learning how to interpret their own data. And TrainingPeaks, for now, diligently swims against the AI sludge current. Long may it continue.

It’s also worth noting Connect+, despite receiving a mixed reception at launch due to Athlete Intelligence, is not all about AI. It also offers more classic Garmin-style bonuses like expert coach videos, Livetrack location sharing and offline Trails. Whether it’s worth the $6.99 monthly fee for you is something we’ll leave for another time.

“Some will want simple, basic answers to questions about their data that AI can help provide and create those insights. Others will embrace the idea of a human coach for motivation, accountability, and some of the things that maybe are a little more difficult to get through an AI bot or agent,” Trenkle explains.

He’s also bold on how much he believes Garmin understands its user base, versus the ever-growing competition.

“I think Garmin has shown through our history that we know our customers and we tend to know our customers better than our competition can know our customers, and part of the reason that we're able to do that is because we are vertically integrated, right? We're talking to our customers. We are customers of our own products ourselves,” says Trenkle.

I imagine some folks in the “engineering focused” Garmin eyeroll as much as I do at the attempts elsewhere to make AI a tightly integrated part of its fitness tech. But what the future holds for Garmin and AI? It’s still in the works.

Are you looking for a Garmin watch, but not sure what to get? Take our quiz below to find your perfect smartwatch.

• A new Garmin update could share the location of cyclists
• The locations would show up for drivers in Waze
• It appears the feature will be fully opt-in from the user side

Whether you're a cyclist, driver, or both, we can probably all agree that a better awareness of who's using the road is helpful for everyone — and Garmin is rumored to be working on a new feature that would pass on the location of cyclists to the Waze app.

This comes from Gadgets & Wearables, reporting on hidden code discovered in the latest version of the Garmin Connect app. That code includes the text strings "share location with Waze", "share your rides with Waze", and "Waze location sharing", which is telling.

There also appears to be a consent and onboarding flow already included in the app. That all suggests that the feature could be launching imminently, but there's no guarantee that it will roll out until Garmin makes it official.

Clearly this would be very much opt-in, and only available when the cyclist was using the LiveTrack feature for an activity. LiveTrack is designed for location sharing with friends and family, but it could be easily adapted to work with Waze too.

Safer on the road

We don't know much about how this is going to work yet, but presumably approaching drivers aren't going to be able to see your name and health stats if you decide to make use of this — just that there's a cyclist on the road up ahead.

That should make journeys safer for both cyclists and those in vehicles, especially on narrow and winding roads, and in the evening or when visibility is otherwise difficult. It's actually difficult to see many downsides, if this works as advertised.

Waze is already well known for the depth and breadth of information that it displays on its maps, with a lot of real-time details supplied by users. The maps include updates on roadworks, speed traps, accidents, gas prices, and more.

We'll have to wait and see which Garmin wearables will support the feature and exactly how the integration works, but it sounds promising. As Google owns Waze, cyclist alerts might even graduate to Google Maps eventually.