I’ve only had access to the Google Fitbit Air and the new Google Health app for a few hours, at the time of writing, and already there are some interesting things to say about one of this year’s biggest contenders for the best fitness tracker crown.
While the stats and numbers you get in the free tier are a little basic, they’re roughly in line with what you’d expect from a $99.99 / £84.99 / AU$199 tracker. But it’s the premium AI health coach that’s impressed me with its ability to incorporate contextual information and change your weekly plan just by chatting to it.
The tracker is light and comfortable, it’s got some cool features even at the free tier, and Whoop (the other big player in the screenless fitness tracker space) should be worried.
While Whoop offers more detailed metrics, it’s also prohibitively expensive and doesn’t allow you to buy the fitness tracker or use it for free after purchase in any form: it entirely relies on an expensive subscription service starting at £169 / $199 / AU$299 annually, and going up from there. Cancel that subscription, and it’s just an inert hunk of plastic. You can read all about it in my Google Fitbit Air vs Whoop breakdown.
My early impression of the Google Fitbit Air and its Google Health Premium AI coaching service is that it’s designed to help beginner-to-frequently-training athletes, with simple metrics, round numbers, and a friendly interface that does a lot of its calculations behind the scenes.
Those who are already heavily invested in Whoop’s ecosystem won’t get the granularity of data they are used to, and thus might not be tempted by the lower price of the Fitbit. However, for the rest of us, I think this is going to do very well.
Design and comfort
The Google Fitbit Air weighs just 12g. It’s light, slender, and the performance loop band I’m wearing is very comfortable, although it does have a tendency to get a little… dank during a very sweaty workout, such as my first test run completed during a heatwave here in the UK.
It offers no interaction on the device at all, just a charging LED. As I said in previous pieces, it’s almost like an older pedometer-style Fitbit that clipped to your clothes, just in a modern form factor and made by Google.
I have to say, it’s very unobtrusive, being around two-thirds the width of the Whoop MG. It’s very easy to wear this in conjunction with another device or a non-smart analog watch on the other wrist. Funnily enough, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
Early comparison testing
I immediately incorporated the Google Fitbit Air into my smartwatch testing routine. I went on two runs with the Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro on one hand (the device I’m currently closing out on testing, which on previous runs matched very closely with the Garmin Fenix 8 Pro), a Polar H10 chest strap, and the Google Fitbit Air on the other.
Unfortunately, the usually pinpoint-accurate chest strap malfunctioned, but the average heart rate between the two wrist-based wearables was just 1bpm apart. I know the Huawei Watch Fit 5 Pro is quite accurate based on previous testing, so it’s a positive early sign, but before my full review I’ll be using a (working) chest strap to test the Google Fitbit Air.
What I was most impressed with was the Google Health Coach, the app’s flagship AI feature that encompasses everything else. After a brief chat about my goals, it set up an early plan for me, comprised of three gym sessions and two runs a week, to build muscle while maintaining baseline cardiovascular fitness.
After I completed my test runs, Google noted the extreme weather here in the UK, and mentioned it in the workout’s summary as something to take into account when viewing my metrics, as my heart rate was likely to be higher than normal. Very clever: exactly the sort of contextual information fitness trackers have been missing since their inception, pulled in automatically using location and weather data as well as fitness data.
Impressed, I tapped the ever-present blue ‘Ask Coach’ button and typed “I might swap one of my gym sessions for a long run this week. Can you update my plan?”
Hey presto: not only did it update my plan, but it also surfaced the Long Endurance Run activity profile for me to use on my next running day. I must admit, my early experiment with this AI Health Coach is a resounding success.
But at what cost?
All of this, unfortunately, comes at the expense of existing Fitbit badges and features. The app has been renamed, rebranded and redesigned overnight, with all badges and community features lost in favor of the AI-first approach.
A particular target of criticism is the food logging feature, which I’ve not yet tried, but Google says „fixes are coming“.
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