Google sent us the Fitbit Air for a long-term review, and it’s the company’s first real push into screenless activity trackers. The target is clear: Whoop. But Google’s pitch is simple. The Fitbit Air costs just $129 CAD upfront, no mandatory subscription required.
A Google Health Premium subscription is available if you want extra features, but the tracker holds its own without it.
The Fitbit Air is tiny. Without a band it measures 34.9 mm long, 17 mm wide, and just 8.3 mm thick, and with the band attached it weighs only 12 grams. You actually forget it’s there on your wrist, as it’s so light and small.
Our review unit came with the Performance Loop band in Lavender, which is also available in Fog, Obsidian, and Lavender Berry. The fabric is comfortable enough, but it does look a bit like a hospital bracelet and has a habit of catching on sweater cuffs when you’re getting dressed. It’s a minor annoyance but worth knowing going in.
For everyday wear, grabbing an Active band in Obsidian, Fog, or Lavender Berry is a smart move from the start. It’s shower-safe and dries a lot faster than the default Performance Loop. If you need something that looks a bit more put together for work or a night out, Google also offers the Elevated band in Obsidian, Porcelain, and Moonstone, so you’re not walking into a meeting looking like you just came from the gym.
Hopefully more band colour options are on the way, and third party bands will likely fill that gap soon. For example, bands that match all types of skin colour for those that don’t want a bright band that’s in your face.
Setup is straightforward and the Fitbit Air works with both Android and iOS.
On iPhone, you plug it into the magnetic proprietary charger to keep it topped up during the initial software update, then turn on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, open the Google Health app, and tap “Add a device” in the Connections menu. That’s pretty much it.
Since there’s no screen, Google came up with a clever way to check battery life. A firm double-tap on the chassis triggers a small LED indicator: white means you’re above 20%, blinking red means you’re below 20%, and solid red means you’re at zero. The device will also vibrate when the battery dips under 20%, and your phone gets push notifications when you have 24 or 12 hours of charge left. It’s a simple system that works well once you get used to it.
Battery life is one of the Fitbit Air’s strongest selling points. Google rates it at up to seven days, but in our testing it did better than that. We started at 99% on day one and still had 50% left by day five. The 20% warning didn’t kick in until day seven and a half, and we estimate the battery would have lasted a full nine days without a forced recharge mid-test due to the Google Health app update.
What’s even more impressive is how little intensive activity affects things. A full two-hour tennis session on day seven used just 1% of the total charge. That means you can track continuous movement and real-time heart rate all week without the battery anxiety that comes with most smartwatches (looking at you, Apple Watch).
When you do need to charge, five minutes on the cable gets you through a full day, and a full charge from zero takes about 90 minutes. Just don’t lose the proprietary charging cable, because it’s not something you’ll easily replace at a corner store.
Under the hood, the Fitbit Air is packing a lot for something so small. You get an optical heart rate monitor, a 3-axis accelerometer and gyroscope, red and infrared sensors for blood oxygen monitoring, a skin temperature sensor, and a vibration motor. It’s water-resistant to 50 metres and can share heart rate data to compatible gym equipment over Bluetooth 5.0.
On the storage side, it holds seven days of detailed minute-by-minute motion data, one day of workout data, 30 days of daily totals, and logs heart rate every two seconds.
All that hardware adds up to a serious amount of data. If you love digging into health stats, you’ll have plenty to work with: weekly cardio, steps, readiness, sleep, heart rate, calories, vitals, distance, exercise days, food, hydration, weight, cardio load, floors, active zone minutes, and more. If you’re not a data nerd, it can feel like a lot at first, but you get used to it quickly.
We started testing on the old Fitbit app, but the new Google Health app landed on the 21st and it’s a completely different experience. It’s organized around four tabs at the bottom, starting with the Today tab, which you can customize to show your favourite metrics and gives you quick access to manual logging and messages from your coach.
Some of the design elements could be cleaned up a bit to make it easier on the eyes. There are data areas that feel a bit scattered all over and it can be overwhelming at first seeing so many metrics at once.
The Today tab is where you’ll spend most of your time. You get all your key metrics at a glance across up to four pages, plus an ongoing daily digest from the Gemini-powered Google Health Coach. The coach drops real-time feedback based on your activity throughout the day, and the history sticks around so you can go back and review previous days rather than losing everything at midnight.
The Fitness tab is where you build and manage workout plans, check recent exercises, and kick off new sessions. The Sleep tab goes deep on overnight data, sleep scores, and long-term trends. The Health tab gives you the bigger picture, covering overnight vitals, nutrition goals, cycle health, and features like Irregular Rhythm Notifications and silent alarms. One catch for Canadians: medical record storage is currently US-only, so that feature will have to wait.
On the integration side, Google Health pulls data in from Apple Health, which means your existing apps and devices carry over. The one gap right now is that it doesn’t push data back to Apple Health, though Google says that’s coming in the next few months.
Sleep tracking on the Fitbit Air is seriously detailed. It monitors duration, score, schedule, efficiency, stages, and quality, all measured against your personal sleep goals.
Compared to Apple Watch, the numbers do run slightly lower, likely due to different algorithms under the hood. But what Google does better is explain what the numbers actually mean. Instead of dumping a pile of charts on you, the app walks you through your sleep efficiency and average heart rate in plain language. It’s the kind of context that makes the data actually useful rather than just something you glance at and forget.
The real highlight of the Fitbit Air is the Google Health Coach. Powered by Gemini, it doesn’t just show you numbers. It actually talks to you, pulls in your real-time health data, and gives you feedback that feels genuinely personal.
Apple Health isn’t even close. It’s essentially a data warehouse that collects everything and does very little with it. There’s no personalized plan, no proactive coaching, and no real conversation. Google is lapping Apple here and it’s not particularly close.
The automatic activity detection is one of the best things about this tracker. Run, walk, cycle, spin, row, use an elliptical, or play team sports for more than 15 minutes and you’ll get a notification plus a full workout recap within 30 minutes of finishing. You only need to classify a sport once and the algorithm remembers it, getting smarter the more you use it.
It’s not flawless though. The start and end times were sometimes off and we had to go in and manually adjust them.
What sets the coach apart is that it doesn’t wait for you to ask. It’ll proactively message you if it spots something worth flagging or send a summary right after a workout. After playing tennis five times in six days for a total of eight hours, the Google Health Coach messaged us to say that taking an easy rest day on Saturday was the right call to shake off heavy legs. That kind of contextual nudge is genuinely useful and feels nothing like the passive data dumps you get from Apple Watch.
You can also ask the coach to break down any workout on demand. It’ll give you a heart rate zone breakdown, an effort assessment, peak cardiovascular strain time, movement analysis, and heart rate recovery capacity. It can even build a personalized daily plan and track your progress over time. Beyond sport, it handles menstrual cycles, nutrition, mental well-being, and daily food intake.
We wore the Fitbit Air alongside an Apple Watch for the entire testing period. Honestly, the Google Health app became the one we kept coming back to. The data is interactive and actually tells you something. Apple Watch data just sits there. After a while, you also start to realize that getting every notification on your wrist isn’t really necessary, and the Fitbit Air makes that tradeoff pretty easy to accept.
Unlike Whoop, Google keeps the core experience completely free, and the app plays nicely with other hardware too, including the Fitbit Inspire 3, Charge 6, Versa 4, Sense 2, and Pixel Watch 4. The free tier is genuinely solid, covering activity tracking for steps, calories, distance, cardio load, and readiness, plus full sleep tracking with scores, schedules, duration, and stages. You also get heart rate, heart rate variability, breathing rate, blood oxygen, and wellness logging for weight, nutrition, water intake, moods, and cycles. That’s a lot for nothing.
If you want more, Google Health Premium adds 24/7 Ask Coach access with science-backed answers, adaptive weekly fitness plans, deeper sleep insights with coaching, proactive health alerts, and AI-generated medical record summaries. You also get a full workout video library with expert trainers and a guided mindfulness and meditation library.
At the end of the day, the Fitbit Air is a seriously impressive little device. No mandatory subscription, nine days of battery life, and a Gemini-powered coach that actually helps you do something with your data. At $129 in Canada, it’s hard to argue with. Apple really needs to get into the screenless tracker game and price it competitively. Until that happens, the Fitbit Air is a worthy contender and we are going to keep testing this long term.
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