Google Fitbit Air Review The Affordable Whoop Alternative With A Messy AI-powered App

The Sellout Google Fitbit Air is the hottest thing in fitness right now, with a low buying cost, accurate heart rate-based metrics, and an optional AI-powered assistant. But is it worth your money? I spent a week wearing the Google Fitbit Air to find out. I slept with it on, worked out with it on, and compared it to other wearables during my testing. Make sure you watch to the end to see if I recommend it. And you can check out the best deals on the Google Fitbit Air fitness tracker in the links below. Before we dive into this video, make sure to scan the QR code to learn more about becoming a TechRadar Insider. Membership is completely free and gives you access to exclusive perks, rewards, and more. Right, let's get into it, starting with value for money. The Google Fitbit Air costs $100 in the US and £85 in the UK. That's pretty cheap, but that's just for the tracker, a choice of one of three bands, and the charger. The tracker just handles your basic metrics. For the AI-powered fitness features, such as the health coach, you'll need to subscribe to Google Health Premium. This used to be called Fitbit Premium and costs $10 or £8 a month. Buying a year's membership up front saves you around two months overall. Considering the price of other popular fitness trackers, this isn't bad for what you get. When you consider WootBands require an expensive subscription, which you always pay for, and devices like Apple Watches start at $250 or £200, you can buy this tracker cheaply, keep it simple and own it outright, or splurge for an annual subscription to the premium app, changing your mind after your subscription expires. The closest comparison would be something like the Samsung Galaxy Fit 3, which is a cheap, high-quality tracker with no premium subscription, but packs a big screen and just doesn't look as nice. Which brings us nicely onto design. The Google Fitbit Air's design can be split into two components, the physical device, which is excellent, and the new Google Health app, which is a slight misfire. The Fitbit Air comprises the tracker itself and a wraparound band in a choice of three styles, a silicon active band, the woven performance loop, which I'm wearing here, or the polyurethane or pleather elevated modern band. Each comes with their own colour option and a plastic clasp. On the underside of the tracker are the optical heart rate sensor, skin temperature sensor, and an accelerometer and gyroscope used for counting steps. It weighs just 12 grams with the strap, so it's light and easy to wear, which is crucial for sleep tracking. I wore it on my right wrist with the watch on my left during the day and I didn't feel like an obnoxious techie. The performance loop strap is, in my opinion, the best looking of the three options in this respect, but none of them look terrible, although I wouldn't wear the silicon active band for the suit. The tracker also has a haptic vibrate function. If you set an alarm in the app, this can then be disabled with a tap on top of the device. And that's pretty much all the interaction you have with the sensor and band. Everything else, as with one of the best smart rings or other screenless tracking options, is done via the app. The app is where Google's design sometimes falls down. Split into four tabs, today, fitness, sleep, and health, the Google Health app features a dashboard with key metrics at the top and insights or libraries of content below it. But with information scattered across a quartet of tabs, it's hard to find certain granular metrics or content you're looking for. It's really quite messy and the premium app embeds important information in reams of AI generated text. It's definitely not glanceable. The Fitbit Air records the usual metrics you'd expect with a modern fitness tracker. Step count, heart rate, floors climbed, sleep stages, and so forth. Fitbit's daily readiness score shows you how prepared your body is for exercise based on recent activity and your sleep scores, while it also surfaces weekly cardio goals, hydration, and basic food logging. FDA cleared irregular heart rate rhythm notifications will tell you if your heart rate is abnormal, which is terrific to see on a device this cheap. But that is all the free version of the app gets you. There's no workout builder, limited mindfulness and workout content, no way to log sickness, and anything else. Premium users get mindfulness and workout content from Fitbit's huge library of sessions, the Google Health Coach chatbot, which acts as an interface across the whole app, AI-powered food logging, which you can do just by taking a photo of your meal or snack, and the ability to generate workouts automatically. The AI Coach feature basically is the whole premium tier. The app revolves around it and Google's gone all in. You can ask it to build your workouts, adjust your sleep times, change your weekly workout plan, tell it that you're sick, add contextual information like you're at a friend's wedding so won't be training on the weekend, all that stuff. The chatbot will basically operate the rest of the app for you, or in its summaries, remember and surface that extra context. So if you've told it you're getting sick and you then don't run as far as you'd like, or you don't hit your goal, the coach will remember and adjust your expectations during the planning and feedback phases. It's very clever, but whether you like it will depend on your tolerance for chatbots. It's quite sycophantic and encouraging, which I find very fake, although you can ask it to tone that down a bit. As intelligent or useful as it is, those who use Gemini and ChatGPT for everything will get a lot out of it, while those who loathe AI chatbots and just want numbers will likely loathe the premium tier as well. Even as somebody who doesn't love speaking to chatbots day to day, I actually found the Google Health Coach pretty good. It acts as a cool macro feature that works across the whole of the rest of the app, helping to surface content I need and log stuff without having to go through the rest of the app. I could tell it about a strength workout I've just done, provide sets, reps and weights, and the coach would log it in the workout section and include it in rest and recovery summaries, also adjusting my workout plan. Here, I'll show you. I am planning a workout this evening based on a 5-set and 5-rep structure. Can you factor that into my workout plan? It even accounts for my poor spelling. And here you go. The coach put my workout together and updated my weekly workout plan. Food logging's nice and easy too, as you can use the coach's AI to estimate calories, macro and micronutrient content just by sending a plate of food and small description. As previously mentioned, it factored in illness and other circumstances I told it about too. It's a very clever feature. Accuracy-wise, the Fitbit Air matched up well to my Apple Watch Ultra 3. I ran a 10k with them both around one of my local routes. Here's how I got on. Just completed a 10k test run in which I'm testing the Google Fitbit Air, the brand new fitness tracker that everybody's talking about, against the Apple Watch Ultra 3, which I'm wearing on the other hand. So we'll dive into all the stats when I'm finished, including how it compares against a chest-mounted heart rate monitor, and what the AI fitness coach has to say about it. Back in the studio, they showed an average heart rate difference of just 3 BPM between them. In terms of calorie count, the Apple Watch Ultra 3 recorded around 750 calories, while the Fitbit recorded around 775, a perfectly acceptable margin of error. Unfortunately, it did overestimate my run by 400 meters, but that's a result of the Fitbit Air pulling the GPS off my phone rather than my watch. It also matched Apple closely during sleep, with 4 minutes of difference in total sleep time, but a slight difference in sleep scores. Apple said 90, while Fitbit said 81. So, would I buy the Fitbit Air? Yes. It's very light, less obtrusive than budget rivals with screens, and much better value for most people as a standard fitness tracker than the Whoop, unless you're a serious hybrid athlete who's gone all-in on optimization. Runners would benefit from getting a proper smartwatch with more running features, such as a Garmin watch. The Google Health Coach is worth exploring, and you get 3 months worth free to make your mind up. But even if you don't want to engage with the AI, the base-level fitness tracker is still great value for money for people who just want to see the numbers. But what do you think? Have you tried the new AI Health Coach? Are you an existing Fitbit user who hates the new app? Do you love the look of the Fitbit Air? Let us know what you think in the comments below. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.