Google’s new screenless health tracker costs £84.99 and requires no monthly subscription to use. The Fitbit Air is the first addition to the Fitbit family since October 2023 and coincides with the launch of the newly rebranded and revamped Google Health app.

It follows in the footsteps of Whoop and Oura, whose wearables have defined the screenless fitness tracker market up until now, and joins newcomers to the space like Amazfit, Polar, Samsung, Ultrahuman and purportedly Garmin, which is rumoured to be releasing its own take on the category later this year.

Google Fitbit Air

Cons

• Automatic activity tracking isn’t perfect
• Gemini hallucinations

Features at a Glance

Battery Life	Up to 7 days
Water Resistance	Up to 50 metres
Connectivity	Android + iOS
Built-in GPS	No

The Fitbit Air is compatible with both Android and iOS devices, and the bulk of features are free to use even if you don’t extend beyond the three-month free trial to Google Health Premium: a £7.99 per month membership tier that grants users access to an AI-powered chatbot, personalised coaching, adaptive fitness plans and more detailed sleep insights.

The Air comes in a choice of three wristband styles in the UK: an ‘Active‘ band made from silicone, an ‘Elevated Modern‘ band made from polyurethane, and a ‘Loop‘ band made from a woven yarn blend of recycled polyester, nylon and elastane. The Active and Loop bands can be picked up in four colourways: obsidian, fog, lavender and berry. The Elevated Modern band is available in obsidian, porcelain and moonstone.

There’s no bicep band at launch, but expect Google to release more styles, and perhaps even compatible clothing, down the line. For now at least, Google wants it on show. ‘Wow, is that the new Fitbit Air?’

A small, clip-on sensor unit continuously measures your biometric data, including heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen saturation and skin temperature, as well motion during activities and sleep. The Fitbit Air has no built-in GPS, but location data can be tracked through the GPS on your smartphone whenever you start an outdoor workout.

Google Fitbit Air packaging

The Google Fitbit Air sensor unit on a Loop band

The battery life is listed as seven days. It recharges by clipping the sensor module to a magnetic charging cable, which attaches to USB-C-compatible power adapters. Google says a quick charge function provides one full day of wear in five minutes.

There’s no display on the Fitbit Air. Instead, the user interface comes courtesy of the Google Health smartphone app. There, data gets crunched by an algorithm and feeds into customisable dashboards that get more accurate the longer it’s worn. Insights fall under four tabs within the app: Today, Fitness, Sleep, and Health.

Having had a week to test the new Google Fitbit Air, here’s my initial verdict on who this wearable is for, what I like about it, plus a few things I’m yet to be convinced by.

The most appealing aspect of the Fitbit Air, for many people, will be its price. At £85, it’s almost half the cost of one year of Whoop’s cheapest annual membership tier and more than three times cheaper outright than the Oura Ring 4, which costs an additional £5.99 per month for full app access.

Google Health Premium costs £7.99 per month (or £79.99 if you pay for a year up front), but from first impressions, I think the basic tier will provide many users with enough data. There’s also the option to dip in and out.

Screenless fitness trackers are designed to be distraction-free. Ditching a display is central to that. So is comfort. You have to be able to feasibly wear it and forget it, without wanting to tear the thing off in the middle of the night. That means no chafing, no rubbing and no pressure points.

The Google Fitbit Air passes the wearability test. The sensor unit, which measures 17mm wide and weighs 12g together with the Loop band, is the slimmest, lightest and most minimal wrist-worn health tracker I’ve tested. After a day, I stopped noticing that I had it on.

The Fitbit Air’s Loop and Elevated Modern bands could easily be mistaken for bracelets. The sensor unit is visible from the side, but it’s hidden from above. The only wearables that I can think of that match its discreetness are smart rings and the NOWATCH, which hides its sensors behind a traditional watch face. Naturally, the Sports band looks more like a traditional fitness tracker, but it’s a practical option to switch in for swimming and higher-intensity workouts.

The Google Fitbit Air side-by-side with the Whoop 5.0 MG

The revamped Google Health app (formerly the Fitbit app) looks clean, is easy to navigate, and there’s an option to customise the layout depending on the metrics you want to see.

Under the Today tab, you can quickly view and dive into core stats like steps, sleep, readiness and calories burned. The Fitbit Air passively monitors your heart rate and movement 24/7, with both logged workouts and other activities, like chores or gardening, all feeding into your cardio load score. This indicates how much strain you’ve put on your cardiovascular system each day.

Under the Fitness tab, you can find a log of your recent activities and view at-a-glance metrics from the past week. The Sleep tab provides a breakdown of recent trends, while offering insights around your recent sleep behaviour and quality in the context of your daily activities and cardio load.

The Coach tab shows a customisable dashboard of your core health metrics, including resting heart rate, heart rate variability, breathing rate and SpO2. There’s also a Gemini-powered Coach chatbot, which you can initiate conversations with.

Inside the Google Health app with a Google Health Premium subscription

Gemini is what adds context to your data. Under the Today tab, it reacts to your sleep scores each morning, giving recommendations for the day using clear, easy-to-understand terminology. This repeats whenever you log a workout, building a diary around your day.

During my testing so far, the Fitbit Air is yet to be anything but positive and complimentary about my sleep duration and quality, which sits in stark contrast to my Garmin watch, which picks up more interruptions and awake time. The day after logging an activity, the Fitbit Air will invariably tell me to rest and consider things like ‘keeping things low-key with a light walk’, or to ‘keep the water flowing’. At this stage, this is more of an observation than a critique.

What is concerning, however, is Gemini’s ‘hallucinations’. It’s so eager to please that I’ve found it occasionally just makes things up. One time, it made up that I had scheduled a spin class. It would also use oddly worded terminology, like suggesting that I focussed on ‘loose legs rather than speed’ for a recovery run that I had scheduled. After an upper body push workout, it also told me to ‘flush out the legs after those heavy sets’.

Similarly, during the recent heatwave we had in the UK, I asked it if it could tell me the temperature. Because it presumably didn’t know, it said ‘we’re looking at highs of around 23-degrees Celsius’. It was, in fact, set to be 34-degrees Celsius that day: the hottest May day on record. I’d rather Gemini would admit that it didn’t know for certain rather than make things up entirely.

I’ve found that the more prescriptive and detailed you are – i.e. logging the exact exercises you did – the less this happens. The more you leave for Gemini to interpret, the more I’ve found these so-called hallucinations occur.

Google says that the Fitbit Air ‘will detect and track common activities automatically’ when you have Google Health Premium. These ‘common’ activities include running, walking, cycling, elliptical and rowing. But it also supports live and retrospective logging of over 140 activity types.

It will take time to get a more complete picture, but based on initial tests, the accuracy of the Fitbit Air seems slightly off versus my other wearables when it comes to tracking outdoor workouts. One run effort was 14 seconds quicker per kilometre than what my Garmin Forerunner 170 tracked, and added an extra 160m to the total distance. When I tested it against an Apple Watch Ultra 3, it similarly overshot my distance by 120m. This is forgivable, considering it’s fitness tracker, not a GPS sports watch, but it’s something to bear in mind if you want the most accurate running data.

I also had some issues with automatic activity detection. On outdoor runs and walks, it logged my efforts each time. However, it failed to pick up on a 40-minute upper body workout. When I raised this with Gemini, it admitted that while the Fitbit Air’s SmartTrack ‘is great for continuous movement’, the sensors ‘often don’t see enough consistent motion to trigger a “workout” on their own’.

None of this is a dealbreaker. The GPS limitations will be the same for any screenless wearable that relies on a smartphone for location tracking, and I have few qualms manually starting a workout in the Fitbit app as opposed to relying on the luxury of automatic activity detection.

There are likely some very valid reasons why Google couldn’t fit a USB-C port onto the side of the Fitbit Air and also why it’s not compatible with Google Pixel Watch chargers. But in a time where we could all do without another single-application charging cable, it feels like a missed opportunity. Otherwise, the seven day battery life is plenty and the magnetic charging cable means you’re less likely to misplace the sensor when it’s off your body.

The launch of the Fitbit Air reminds me of when Google gave away a bunch of Google Home speakers for free to Spotify members. I cashed in on that offer because hey, free stuff. But even then, six years ago, I was aware of what that might mean for my data. When Google acquired Fitbit, it set out its commitment to keeping health data separate from its advertising – and it reiterated that promise again when it announced the Fitbit Air. In the UK, there are GDPR restrictions in place to safeguard its usage when it comes to advertising, and Google also sets out its approach to health data protection here.

Question marks remain over the accuracy of outdoor workout data, and automatic activity detection isn’t perfect. Gemini’s hallucinations will also need to be ironed out. But all of these things will likely get better over time.

For the average health-conscious person, the Fitbit Air is the best value screenless fitness tracker you can buy right now, offering all the necessary data for keeping tabs on your workouts, sleep and recovery, without having to pay a monthly membership fee.

Luke Chamberlain is the ecommerce editor for Men’s Health UK where he compiles expert-led buying guides and in-depth product reviews across gym wear, fitness tech, supplements, and grooming. Responsible for testing everything from the latest gym headphones to the best beard trimmers, Luke also enlists the help of leading health and wellness experts to help readers make informed choices when shopping online. He also covers major sales events for Men’s Health, including Black Friday and Amazon Prime Day, scouting and verifying hundreds of discounts in order to recommend only the most genuine deals on offer. A magazine journalism graduate from the University of Sheffield in 2018, Luke has also worked as assistant editor for Outdoor Swimmer magazine and as an ecommerce writer for The Recommended. When he’s not testing the latest health and fitness products, he’s busy plotting routes for his next trail run or gravel ride out of London. Follow Luke on Instagram at @lukeochamb