Google Fitbit Air Review

A post by Yousef Akbar

· 6 min read

review · hardware · health

A few months ago, my Apple Watch strap broke and I stopped using it for a while. I went on a quest to find a suitable wearable fitness tracker and settled on Google’s Fitbit Air.

My requirements while searching were the following:

Price

The Fitbit Air sits at a very attractive price point ($99), and it is a one-time fee. In contrast, the WHOOP is priced higher and includes a yearly subscription fee with multiple membership tiers.

The Fitbit does have a paid tier as well, which adds on personalized coaching with Gemini, adaptive plans, sleep guidance, etc.

You can essentially replicate some of the data analysis and personalized monitoring by self-hosting your own health data using vitald, since your data is not vendor-locked and can be extracted from the Google API.

Look and feel

No complaints whatsoever here. The design of the Fitbit is sleek, subtle, and super light. Oftentimes I forget I am even wearing it, and that makes sleeping with the Fitbit on very comfortable.

It comes in three color options: black, red/pink, and blue. I picked the first, and it works well for most occasions whether you’re going for a sporty look or business-casual.

Not much more to say on that. It’s a very simple-looking device, and I like that.

Battery life

Compared to the Apple Watch I previously used, the Fitbit Air’s battery life is excellent.

Charging to 100% takes around an hour, and fully charged it lasts me about a full week. For reference, I was used to charging my Apple Watch nightly, which meant I pretty much always lost out on sleep tracking. I usually top it up while showering rather than waiting for the battery to run out, so charging rarely feels disruptive.

The device vibrates and briefly pulses a red light when the battery falls below 20%, and you get a notification on your phone as well to remind you.

To check the battery you can see the percentage on the Google Health app, or you can tap twice on the strap tracker. However, I find the double-tap gesture unreliable; it often takes several attempts before it works.

Health metrics

This device captures most of what I need in terms of health metrics:

It covers pretty much everything I need from a casual fitness tracker.

Accuracy in everyday use

I would give the accuracy a rating of 7.5/10.

Sleep detection has been particularly reliable in my experience. It generally figures out when I have fallen asleep and when I fully wake up. It’s easier to know if sleep metrics are right based on your awareness of how long you slept and how you feel after you wake up.

Similarly the heart rate metrics seem consistent with my experience on the Apple Watch and they are sufficiently accurate. I haven’t compared either device against clinical equipment, so this is a subjective affirmation.

With other metrics - such as calories burned, exercise intensity, readiness, etc. - it’s harder to judge because these devices make estimates based on height, weight, and other factors. Therefore, this is an assessment of everyday consistency rather than medical accuracy.

That said, my own observation of calories in/out vs. daily weight trend seems pretty reasonable (I’m maintaining weight at the moment). It’s not a validation on the accuracy, but more so an affirmation that it works for me.

Integration

Since Fitbit is now Google-owned, the ecosystem pairs very well with the Google Health app for a general view of your metrics.

As I hinted earlier, you also get to export your own data through the Google API and that kind of data ownership I was missing with the Apple Watch and it was a critical factor in this purchase.

Note: Technically Apple Health supports complete XML export as well through HealthKit. The advantage of the Fitbit is the convenient server-side API access.

In fact, I recently rolled out my own self-hosted data aggregation and health monitoring dashboard solution vitald. It’s a systemd-compatible service that periodically pulls my health data, backs it up, stores raw archives, normalizes the data into a Postgres database, and connects it to Grafana for visualization and monitoring. You can read my devlog on how I built it and how you can do the same.

Fitbit also gives you the ability to connect it to gym equipment (although I have not used this feature) to integrate data with it both ways.

That makes it a 9/10 on integrations.

Alarms

One thing I really liked about the Apple Watch is that I could use watch-like features (duh) with it like alarms, timers, and stopwatches.

It’s a bit of a regression with the Fitbit: it only has an alarm feature (you can set up to 9 alarms), and they activate with haptic feedback. The lack of timers and stopwatches makes sense, though, since there is no watch face to it; it’s just a strap, so I knew what to expect.

The haptic feedback is configurable with intensity. At the highest intensity, the vibration is strong enough to wake me up from sleep. Although the gesture to turn it off is really cumbersome and unreliable (tap twice really hard on the strap crown).

This gets a 6.5/10. Could be better in my opinion if silencing it was more convenient with a small button or a more reliable gesture.

Verdict

Overall, I’m very happy with this purchase and I really think it was worth the price for what it’s capable of and the data ownership it provides. The battery life is excellent and it gets out of your way. The auto-detection of activities is a really nice touch too if you can’t be bothered to log them beforehand. With a myriad of metrics, extensive integration potential, and reasonable accuracy, it’s more than enough for the average person to get into fitness tracking and improving their health.

Let me know if you have any thoughts on this device or any other suggestions for similar products worth checking out. Feel free to contact me here.