Christmas inevitably brings overeating so there’s no better time than January to pick yourself up an activity tracker.

These little gadgets slip discreetly on your wrist and tell you exactly what you’ve been up to – but, trust us, it’s more of a Jiminy Cricket conscience than a surveillance state kind of way.

It’s astounding how a low step-count can shame you into walking more and eating less.

We’ve written about a few varieties of fitness tracker before, but for 2016 we decided to road test one of the newer varieties – the Fitbit Charge HR.

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Not content with measuring how many steps you have taken, it tells you how many flights of stairs you have climbed, how many miles you have walked (or run), how many calories you have burned and even keeps an unerringly accurate eye on your heartrate using little lights in the wristband.

All of the functions discussed so far are accessible from just your wrist, but it’s when you sync the Fitbit to your phone that things get properly cool.

Previously activity trackers have been a bit of a let-down when it came to actual exercise such as running, which watches such as Garmin and TomTom have excelled at.

But this little maestro uses Googlemaps to give you decent stats (and heart rate monitoring is especially invaluable in this context).

You can tap in your height and weight and tell it what you’ve been eating for personalised targets, monitor how well you’ve been sleeping, and review a myriad of stats and graphs which will keep tech heads happy for hours.

*Our connection to the phone did drop for a while and it was infurating getting the Fitbit to talk to our phone again, but when we managed it, it was glorious.

Our only other tiny bugbear with the Fitbit Charge HR is that it isn’t properly waterproof. It would be amazing if you could take it swimming and measure your activity in the pool. Or even if you didn’t have to take it off in the shower (and subsequently forget to put it back on).

When this little Fitbit connects to our phone (and hopefully now it permanently will), it is a real game changer and won’t fail to make you more health conscious. Even without a connection, it’s pretty cool.

Our Fibit Charge HR cost £94.99 from eBay.

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*UPDATED: While it worked seamlessly for a while, our Fitbit inexplicably stopped talking to our phone. Our initial review reflected that. After much rebooting and resetting and turning off and on again and hair pulling, it works wonderfully once again.