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Introduction

Google’s Fitbit Air is the new top dog in the screenless tracker market. Sorry Whoop.

The Fitbit Air isn’t the first screenless tracker to hit the market, but it’s the first that has a real chance to knock the Whoop band off its perch, offering essentially the same health insights, if not better, at a fraction of the cost.

That’s because the Whoop 5 will set you back £229/$239 and the Whoop MG goes for £349/$359 – but that’s not an outright cost. That’s a yearly subscription. You’re not actually buying the hardware; you’re essentially renting it. 

The Fitbit Air, on the other hand, starts at just £84.99/$99.99, and even though you need a £7.99/$9.99 per month subscription to get the best insights possible, it’s a combination that you’d need to use for nearly two years before hitting the cost of just one year of Whoop’s subscription. And unlike Whoop, you don’t need the subscription to use the hardware. 

It’s also much smaller and more comfortable than both Whoop and other screenless trackers, with one of, if not the best, companion apps I’ve used on any wearable to date. Is Whoop well and truly in trouble here? Let’s delve in. 

Design

• Incredibly slim and compact
• Very comfortable to wear, even to bed
• Range of affordable straps available

Google isn’t the first brand to dip its toe into the world of screenless trackers – there’s the dominant power that is the Whoop band, along with a few alternatives like the Polar Loop and Amazfit Helio Strap – but none come in quite a compact package as the Fitbit Air. 

Saying this thing is small doesn’t really do it justice, but putting it next to the Whoop MG, Whoop’s option looks comparatively massive – and that’s still slimmer than most smartwatches. It’s not just that it sits quite flat on the arm, measuring at just 8.3mm thick – it’s also around half the width of the Whoop and most smartwatches, and that’s what makes the real difference here.

In the default nylon strap it comes with, the Fitbit Air is easily the most comfortable, stealthy wearable I’ve used to date – even compared to smart rings, which are pretty easy to forget about. It doesn’t catch on sleeves like thicker wearables, it doesn’t snag on pillows when I sleep, and it rarely comes loose from its position. It’s snug on my wrist, but it doesn’t feel like it has a presence. 

Google says that it was designed specifically for sleep, and I believe it; it’s probably the best wrist-worn wearable for sleep I’ve used in a long time because it’s so comfortable and low-profile – and the data I get is bang-on too. But more on that a little later.  

Like the Whoop competition, the actual Fitbit Air is the little pod that lives within the strap, housing all the smarts including the HR sensor and battery, and it’s easily removed. This lets me quickly change up the colour and material of the band to better match my style or the setting – Google is offering a range of options in Fog, Obsidian, Lavender and Berry, and I expect the third-party accessory market will soon explode – making it a versatile bit of kit. 

I’d recommend the silicone strap if you’re intent on using the Air in the shower or the pool, something it can easily handle with 5ATM water resistance – the fabric strap takes a little while to dry off afterwards. 

Unlike Whoop, there aren’t any bicep straps or clothing to wear the Air in different ways, but again, I’ve got a feeling third-party accessory makers will make some strides in this department. 

Features and app

• Google Health is fantastic
• AI-powered Health Coach makes a real difference
• Genuinely personalised daily advice

Without a screen to rely on, the Fitbit Air essentially lives and dies by its companion app – so it’s a good thing that the newly redesigned and rebranded Google Health app is, well, absolutely fantastic. 

The app, available for both iOS and Android, isn’t just another bog-standard companion app that we see all too often from trackers. Instead, it’s better compared to the oft-coveted Apple Health app, offering a comprehensive view of my health with data not just from the Fitbit Air but other wearables and 100s of third-party apps – with a sprinkling of AI.

Well, it’s less of a sprinkling and more of a full-blown AI snowstorm, but stay with me here, because, believe it or not, it’s actually good. Great, in fact. 

The whole app is driven by Google Health Coach, an LLM developed by Google and a team of health experts to ensure the advice provided is accurate and, well, actually useful. I can see all my key stats at a glance, like most other health-focused apps, but it’s Health Coach’s interpretation of my data that makes it stand out.

Rather than just filling the screen with data, numbers, and stats that can be overwhelming, especially for those new to the health and fitness scene, Health Coach breaks things down into language that’s easy to understand. 

The Today tab provides insight into everything that has happened that day, with messages in the morning, afternoon and evening reflecting the data collected. The Fitness tab goes more into depth on my current training plan, while the Sleep tab offers deeply personalised recommendations to help me get a better, more restful night’s sleep.

Importantly, this is all personalised to me, based not only on my data but also on conversations with Health Coach. The latter is arguably the standout feature of the app, allowing me to have what is essentially a casual chat about anything from my recent data trends to advice, and the more information it has, the better the advice gets.

I, for example, head into the office on a Monday and work from home the rest of the week. I mentioned this to Health Coach in a chat about my fitness plans and how I wanted to get more active. It not only used that information to tailor my plans with weekly goals and specific exercise recommendations based on the equipment I have to hand at home, but also to account for my sleep schedule, noting earlier wake-up times on Mondays than on the rest of the week. 

Health Coach can also understand voice and image inputs, allowing me to log data that might not be automatically captured by the Fitbit Air or the third-party app integrations. That allows me to screenshot my calorie intake (complete with macros) in Foodvisor and share that with Health Coach. It’ll then update everything in the app to reflect that, with no errors in logging that I’ve seen.

I can also tell it when I’m feeling more tired or more energetic than usual, and it’ll update its exercise and fitness recommendations on the fly to reflect that.

It’s that intelligent overview and deep understanding of my data that really stands out here, and it’s so much more advanced than the AI offered by competitors like Whoop, Oura and Garmin.

I’m also a big fan of how the Fitbit Air works alongside the Pixel Watch 4. Rather than duplicating data in the app, it’s smart enough to merge both sources, allowing me to, say, wear the Fitbit Air all the time and put the Watch on when I’m exercising or headed out for the day and need a screen. 

There’s also a smart alarm feature baked into the Fitbit Air, which vibrates either at a set time or when it detects I’m in a light phase of sleep close to my preferred wake-up time. The latter makes it much easier to actually get up, rather than fall right back to sleep like I often do, and it’s just the right level of vibration to stir me from sleep. A quick double-tap dismisses the alarm. 

There is a catch here, however; to access some of the more advanced features on offer, a Google Health Premium subscription is needed. Replacing the Fitbit Premium subscription, it’s £7.99/$9.99 per month, but compared to Oura’s £349/$349 alternative at £5.99/$5.99 per month and the incredibly high £349/$359 per year for the Whoop MG, it’s suddenly quite good value. 

Health Premium is also bundled in with Google’s AI Pro and Ultra plans, which I already have, so I didn’t need to pay any extra – and a three-month trial is included free of charge. 

Health and exercise tracking

• Fantastic overview of health and wellbeing
• Top-notch sleep tracking
• Occasional HR inaccuracies at peak heart rates

With a heart rate sensor that’s tracking me 24/7, the Fitbit Air covers all the usual bases for health monitoring; heart rate, HRV, SpO2, body temperature and the like. The Health app translates this to a few key metrics, like readiness, essentially an energy score for the day, along with cardio load for measuring exercise and strain. 

The whole Today view is completely customisable too; if I cared about specific metrics like steps taken, cardio load, or even BPM ranges, I could add them quite easily while removing information I didn’t care about. It offers a great look at my overall health, especially when combined with the aforementioned Health Coach advice I get in the morning, afternoon, and evening, as well as data from third-party apps. 

That’s just as true when it comes to sleep tracking. I used the Oura Ring 4 as my baseline as I feel it most accurately reflects how I’ve slept of all the wearables I’ve tested recently, and the Fitbit Air matched it in many regards. 

The sleep and wake times were pretty much in line, and it picked up a similar amount of disturbances during the night. The sleep stages were a little off – but neither are exactly health-grade EEGs, so it’s always worth taking that aspect with a pinch of salt. More importantly, it aligned with how I actually felt in the mornings; when I had a good sleep, it recognised it, and when I felt groggy, it usually mentioned something affecting my sleep. 

The Sleep tab in the Health app goes into quite a bit of detail here, along with plenty of recommendations on how to get a better sleep, be it more exercise to fall asleep quicker, getting to sleep at a specific time or, in my case, waking up at a more consistent time throughout the week. It’d also use that to further tailor my daily fitness recommendations. Truly smart stuff.

If you’re used to a smartwatch for tracking fitness, switching to the Fitbit Air can take some getting used to. Without a screen to glance at metrics, you have two choices; use your phone to view stats on the Google Health app, or just ignore the metrics altogether and go based on how you feel. 

I’m very much someone who likes to keep an eye on metrics when working out, but the screen-free experience is refreshing; rather than trying to push for distance or keep my heart rate in a specific zone, I can just go with the flow, push when I want to and pull back when needed, and it makes for a much more balanced workout. 

That information is then presented in the app, with the usual core metrics – heart rate, zones, calories burnt, steps taken and other exercise-specific metrics – along with Health Coach’s analysis of the exercise, pointing out elements like where I’ve beaten my PB or made strides. It’s very motivating. 

And, when compared to the Oura Ring 4 that I also use as a baseline for HR-related testing – there’s a reason why doctors take your pulse on your finger and not your wrist – the two are fairly in line with one another. That said, there was a workout where the HR readings dropped my peak zone (around 169bpm) to around 76bpm, before rocketing back up instantly, so it’s not flawless. However, it was a particularly sweaty run, so it could be a case of sweat interference – or just a pre-release bug.  

I don’t have to manually trigger a workout in the app though; that’s only needed if I want to see my metrics on screen in real-time. The Fitbit Air is also surprisingly good at automatic exercise recognition, so much so that I rarely bother to manually trigger tracking in the app when going on the treadmill now. 

It also pretty much nails any long outdoor walks I take, and though it didn’t know what I was doing, it knew I was doing something during a particularly long gardening session. I just had to tell it what I was actually doing in the app afterwards, and it’ll use that as a baseline to automatically recognise that in future. 

Importantly, because the Air is constantly tracking all my metrics, I can retroactively add activities in the Google Health app if it misses something. It’ll then analyse the data from that period and provide me with the same breakdown as if it’d been recorded in real time – albeit without a GPS map overlay. I’ve not actually needed to do that so far, but it’s good for peace of mind.  

Speaking of, the only catch here is that, like the Whoop bands, there’s no built-in GPS. To track outdoor runs with better distance accuracy, I need to have my smartphone with me. It’s not a dealbreaker for me as I tend to use the treadmill more often, but if you like to go on long outdoor runs without a phone, you may be better served by the Pixel Watch 4. 

But again, that’s why the Air shines as a companion to the Pixel Watch 4: I can use the Air for general sleep and well-being tracking, and the Watch 4 for dedicated exercise tracking.

Battery life

• Google claims seven days of battery life
• Closer to two weeks of battery in actual use
• Fast charging tech

Despite the compact dimensions of the Fitbit Air, Google claims that it can last up to seven days before needing a top-up – but in my experience, it has gone far beyond that.

I’ve been wearing the Fitbit Air constantly since it arrived, and despite using the tracker not only to track general health and sleep but also to record several treadmill runs, it took nearly 10 days for the battery to go flat. 

That closes the gap considerably between it and the Whoop MG, which lasts up to 14 days on a charge. Not bad for something that’s much more compact than Whoop’s strap, though it’ll be interesting to see if this stamina is sustained over months of use. 

When it does inevitably need a charge, it uses a similar magnetic charger to the Pixel Watch 4 – but crucially, it’s not the same charger. It would’ve been a nice touch for Google to use the same charging cradle, especially as the Fitbit Air complements the Watch 4 so well. But instead, I need two (very similar-looking) chargers on my desk, ready for use.  

It is a shame that Google hasn’t offered any kind of on-wrist charging like that offered by the Whoop competition, but with fast-charging tech that delivers a day of battery life in five minutes and a full charge in around 90 minutes, there aren’t many gaps in the data. 

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Should you buy it?