00:05The sellout Google Fitbit Air is the hottest thing in fitness right now, with a low buy-in
00:10cost, accurate heart rate based metrics, and an optional AI powered assistant. But is it worth
00:15your money? I spent a week wearing the Google Fitbit Air to find out. I slept with it on,
00:20worked out with it on, and compared it to other wearables during my testing. Make sure you watch
00:25to the end to see if I recommend it. And you can check out the best deals on the Google
00:28Fitbit Air
00:29Fitness Tracker in the links below. Before we dive into this video, make sure to scan the QR code to
00:34learn more about becoming a TechRadar insider. Membership is completely free and gives you
00:39access to exclusive perks, rewards, and more. Right, let's get into it, starting with value for money.
00:48The Google Fitbit Air costs $100 in the US and £85 in the UK. That's pretty cheap, but that's just
00:54for the tracker, a choice of one of three bands, and the charger. The tracker just handles your
00:59basic metrics. For the AI powered fitness features, such as the health coach, you'll need
01:03to subscribe to Google Health Premium. This used to be called Fitbit Premium, and costs $10 or £8
01:09a month. Buying a year's membership upfront saves you around two months overall. Considering the price
01:15of other popular fitness trackers, this isn't bad for what you get. When you consider whoop bands
01:20require an expensive subscription, which you always pay for, never buying the device outright. And devices
01:25like Apple Watches start at $250 or £200, you can buy this tracker cheaply, keep it simple and own it
01:32outright, or splurge for an annual subscription to the premium app, changing your mind after your
01:37subscription expires. The closest comparison would be something like the Samsung Galaxy Fit 3, which
01:42is a cheap, high-quality tracker with no premium subscription, but packs a big screen and just
01:47doesn't look as nice. Which brings us nicely onto design. The Google Fitbit Air's design can be split
01:55into two components. The physical device, which is excellent, and the new Google Health app, which is
02:00a slight misfire. The Fitbit Air comprises the tracker itself and a wraparound band in a choice of
02:05three styles. A silicon active band, the woven performance loop, which I'm wearing here, or the
02:10polyurethane or pleather elevated modern band. Each comes with their own colour option and a plastic
02:16clasp. On the underside of the tracker are the optical heart rate sensor, skin temperature
02:20sensor, and an accelerometer and gyroscope used for counting steps. It weighs just 12 grams with
02:25the strap, so it's light and easy to wear, which is crucial for sleep tracking. I wore it on my
02:30right
02:30wrist with the watch on my left during the day, and I didn't feel like an obnoxious techie. The
02:35performance loop strap is, in my opinion, the best looking of the three options in this respect,
02:40but none of them look terrible, although I wouldn't wear the silicon active band for the suit.
02:44The tracker also has a haptic vibrate function. If you set an alarm in the app, this can then be
02:49disabled with a tap on top of the device. And that's pretty much all the interaction you have
02:54with the sensor and band. Everything else, as with one of the best smart rings or other screenless
02:58tracking options, is done via the app. The app is where Google's design sometimes falls down.
03:03Split into four tabs, Today, Fitness, Sleep, and Health, the Google Health app features a dashboard
03:09with key metrics at the top and insights or libraries of content below it. But with information
03:14scattered across a quartet of tabs, it's hard to find certain granular metrics or content you're
03:20looking for. It's really quite messy, and the premium app embeds important information in reams of AI-generated
03:26text. It's definitely not glanceable.
03:31The Fitbit Air records the usual metrics you'd expect with a modern fitness tracker. Step count,
03:37heart rate, floors climbed, sleep stages, and so forth. Fitbit's daily readiness score shows you
03:42how prepared your body is for exercise based on recent activity and your sleep scores,
03:46while it also surfaces weekly cardio goals, hydration, and basic food logging. FDA-cleared irregular
03:53heart rate rhythm notifications will tell you if your heart rate is abnormal, which is terrific to see
03:58on a device this cheap. But that is all the free version of the app gets you. There's no workout
04:03builder, limited mindfulness and workout content, no way to log sickness, and anything else.
04:09Premium users get mindfulness and workout content from Fitbit's huge library of sessions,
04:13the Google Health Coach chatbot, which acts as an interface across the whole app,
04:17AI-powered food logging, which you can do just by taking a photo of your meal or snack,
04:22and the ability to generate workouts automatically. The AI Coach feature basically is the whole premium
04:27tier. The app revolves around it, and Google's gone all in. You can ask it to build your workouts,
04:34adjust your sleep times, change your weekly workout plan, tell it that you're sick, add contextual
04:39information like you're at a friend's wedding so won't be training on the weekend, all that stuff.
04:43The chatbot will basically operate the rest of the app for you, or in its summaries, remember and
04:48surface that extra context. So if you've told it you're getting sick, and you then don't run as far as
04:53you like, or you don't hit your goal, the coach will remember and adjust your expectations during the
04:58planning and feedback phases. It's very clever, but whether you like it will depend on your tolerance
05:04for chatbots. It's quite sycophantic and encouraging, which I find very fake, although you can ask it to
05:11tone that down a bit. As intelligent or useful as it is, those who use Gemini and ChatGPT for everything
05:16will get a lot out of it, while those who loathe AI chatbots and just want numbers will likely loathe
05:22the premium tier as well. Even as somebody who doesn't love speaking to chatbots day to day,
05:30I actually found the Google Health Coach pretty good. It acts as a cool macro feature that works
05:35across the whole of the rest of the app, helping to surface content I need and log stuff without
05:40having to go through the rest of the app. I could tell it about a strength workout I've just done,
05:43provide sets, reps and weights, and the coach would log it in the workout section and include it in
05:49rest and recovery summaries, also adjusting my workout plan. Here, I'll show you. I am planning a
05:57workout this evening based on a five set and five rep structure.
06:14Can you factor that into my workout plan? It even accounts for my poor spelling.
06:24And here you go. The coach put my workout together and updated my weekly workout plan. Food logging's
06:30nice and easy too, as you can use the coach's AI to estimate calories, macro and micronutrient content
06:35just by sending a plate of food and small description. As previously mentioned, it factored in illness and
06:41other circumstances I told it about too. It's a very clever feature. Accuracy-wise, the Fitbit Air matched up
06:46well to my Apple Watch Ultra 3. I ran a 10k with them both around one of my local routes.
06:51Here's how I got on.
06:53Just completed a 10k test run in which I'm testing the Google Fitbit Air, the brand new fitness tracker that
07:00everybody's talking about, against the Apple Watch Ultra 3, which I'm wearing on the other hand.
07:06So we'll dive into all the stats when I'm finished, including how it compares against chest mounted heart rate
07:10monitor and what the AI fitness coach has to say about it. Back in the studio, they showed an average
07:17heart rate difference of just 3 BPM between them. In terms of calorie count, the Apple Watch Ultra 3
07:22recorded around 750 calories, while the Fitbit recorded around 775, a perfectly acceptable margin of error.
07:28Unfortunately, it did overestimate my run by 400m, but that's a result of the Fitbit Air pulling the
07:34GPS off my phone rather than my watch. It also matched Apple closely during sleep, with 4 minutes
07:40of difference in total sleep time, but a slight difference in sleep scores. Apple said 90, while Fitbit
07:45said 81.
07:49So, would I buy the Fitbit Air? Yes. It's very light, less obtrusive than budget rivals with screens,
07:55and much better value for most people as a standard fitness tracker than the Whoop,
07:59unless you're a serious hybrid athlete who's gone all in on optimization. Runners would benefit from
08:05getting a proper smartwatch with more running features, such as a Garmin watch. The Google
08:09Health Coach is worth exploring, and you get three months worth free to make your mind up. But even if
08:14you don't want to engage with the AI, the base level fitness tracker is still great value for money
08:19for people who just want to see the numbers. But what do you think? Have you tried the new AI
08:23health coach? Are you an existing Fitbit user who hates the new app? Do you love the look
08:28of the Fitbit Air? Let us know what you think in the comments below. Thanks for watching and
08:33we'll see you next time.
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