 Hey guys, it's Lauren Good with The Verge. Yesterday Fitbit announced its newest wearable, the Fitbit Blaze at CES and a lot of you have had questions about what it looks like up close and how it works. So let's get a closer look. It's the first Fitbit with a color LCD touch screen. So when I do this, it brings me to the home screen. You can also use the home button to get to the home screen. So when you swipe down here, you'll see that you have the option to turn notifications off or on, basically put it into a do not disturb mode. And when it is connected to a phone, it's not connected right now, but when it is, you can control your music. You swipe back up, get to the home screen, you can see your steps there. Swipe up once more, you would see notifications, if I happen to have any notifications right now. So go back to the home screen and when you swipe to the right, that's when you start to get into more of the features. You can look at a glimpse of your daily activity, see your current heart rate as well as your resting heart rate. Go back home. I think I'm going to tap that to do that. Keep swiping, get into the exercise tile, the Fit Star tile, which is an app that Fitbit acquired and has customized workouts within this part of the watch. A timer, pretty self-explanatory, alarms and settings. That's where you can do things like adjust the brightness if you want to. Let's go back to exercise since that's kind of the main event of this watch. Tap on exercise. You can see that you have, I think, seven different options here on the watch itself, Fitbit tracks, I think, over a dozen different exercises and you can go into the Fitbit app and you can customize it so that different things will show up here. Now, one of the things that this watch doesn't have that something like the Fitbit Surge has is a GPS built into the watch itself, but it uses connected GPS, which basically means that when you go running or you go cycling with your phone, you will still get GPS tracking, but it's happening through the phone. So in order to do that, you would go to the run tile or you'd go to a cycling tile if it was on here. You would tap this settings button and you would tap use phone GPS and it would connect to the phone and that's how that works. You can also set a secondary stat that you want to appear on the interface. So let's say you cared a lot about heart rate and you wanted to see that. It would show you your time or your distance. You'd swipe and you'd see your secondary stat. Another thing you'll notice about the Fitbit Blaze is that it's not a solid unibody design. It's actually a pop-out tracker, which kind of goes back to Fitbit's earlier designs where you could pop a little pod out of the band and then you can put it into a leather band. Fitbit's coming out with a rose gold frame. The idea behind this is of course that you would be able to dress it up a little bit if you wanted to, assuming that you liked the way it looked, but on the downside, I don't know, it kind of makes it feel a little bit janky. The Blaze has the same optical heart rate sensors that Fitbit introduced last year with the Surge and the Charge HR. The idea is that it tracks your heart rate continuously throughout the day, also during workouts. It also gives you your resting heart rate, so let's say you wear this to bed to track your sleep. You wake up, you get a reading on your resting heart rate. Now the jury's still out on how accurate wrist-based optical heart rate sensors are. Some people will probably still prefer to use a chest strap for working out. Fitbit says that it's the same Cure Pulse technology that's in the other devices, but this will actually record your heart rate more frequently than it did on the other devices, so the sampling rate is higher. It launches this March. It costs $199. A lot of people have been comparing this with a smart watch. It does do smart notifications from your smartphone, which means that if you're getting a text message, if you're getting a phone call, if you're getting a calendar appointment, it will show up on this, but it's not a smart watch in the sense that it doesn't support third-party apps the way something like the Apple Watch does or Android Wear does. It really only runs Fitbit's own apps. It also has a five-day battery life, which a lot of smart watches can't really claim. That's our first look at the new Fitbit Blaze. For more information, check out the story on theverge.com, and also don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube page at YouTube.com.