Can the Fitbit Air Compete with the Whoop Band and the Oura Ring?
The $100 screen-free fitness tracker serves up lots of health and fitness data without saddling you with a pricey subscription
In my ongoing effort to reduce the pings and prods from my pesky phone, I’ve considered ditching my trusty Apple Watch SE. Even though I’ve used it for years and love it for tracking runs, rides, and steps, it’s ultimately just another dinging display vying for my attention.
So I was intrigued when Google recently released the display-free Fitbit Air, stepping into the ring with popular screenless trackers like the Whoop band and the Oura Ring.
Photo: Courtney Lindwall/Consumer Reports Photo: Courtney Lindwall/Consumer Reports
Does the Fitbit Air Require a Subscription?
Nope! With the $100 device, you get full access to the standard health and fitness data in the app—on sleep, workouts, calorie burn, heart health, and more. Given the frustrating creep of digital subscriptions, that’s much appreciated. The Whoop band, for example, turns into a boring bracelet without a $200-a-year membership. For the Oura ring, the added expense is $70 a year.
As I explain below, the $100-a-year upgrade to Google Health Premium essentially just gets you easy-to-pass-up extras like Google’s AI health coaching and AI analysis of your in-app stats.
Design and Comfort
As far as fit goes, the Air does what you want. It’s comfortable enough to wear that you can strap it on and forget about it. The tracker features a handful of sensors tucked inside a small oblong shell and a basic, adjustable fabric-fastening band. The woven band only comes in a single size, but it fits snugly even on my narrow wrists and stayed put throughout the day and night without a problem.
Photo: Google Photo: Google
For the standard woven band, Google gave us a few fun color options, including a light gray-blue, pink-red, and standard black. I chose the lavender, though I’d say it appears a bit more periwinkle in real life. Because the device is easy to pop out of the band, you can quickly change options, even moving to the sleeker and more sweat-proof “active” band available for $35 in the same colors.
Google says the tracker is water-resistant up to 50 meters, but the woven band isn’t. I’d swap out the woven band if you sweat heavily or plan to get it wet regularly.
As the name suggests, the Air is also impressively lightweight. At just 12 grams (band included), it weighs less than half as much as my Apple Watch SE and, yes, less than the Whoop, Polar Loop, and Amazfit Helio Strap bands. It’s also slimmer than Fitbit’s previous featherweight champ, the Inspire, which sells for the same price.
What Health and Fitness Metrics Does It Track?
I don’t place many heavy demands on my smartwatch. My main goals are to monitor my overall health and increase my activity. So for me, the Fitbit Air tracks plenty. With the app, I can keep tabs on a whole range of metrics, including my daily calorie burn, step count, and mileage, things like heart rate and heart rate variability, and sleep health data, including my overall Sleep Score, sleep efficiency, and time spent in various sleep stages.
In general, I was pleased with how user-friendly and actionable Google’s new health app interface is. I didn’t feel bogged down by hard-to-decipher data, and I could easily see how close I was to meeting my weekly goals. I will say, though, if you upgrade to Google Health Premium, all the “AI insights” that get integrated across the app create a lot of clutter.
I particularly like Google’s dynamic “cardio load” feature, which is displayed front and center on the app’s home screen. It tallies up all the cardiovascular work you put in, including both logged workouts and unlogged periods of elevated heart rate, and lets you know when you’ve hit your weekly target and whether you’re at risk of going overboard, somewhat similar to Apple’s “training load” and Whoop’s “strain” metrics.
1 / 5 : The home screen of the standard app is simple and easy to understand.
Source: Courtney Lindwall/Consumer Reports
As for sleep tracking, I wore my Apple Watch and Fitbit Air together on multiple nights, and the data from the two devices was similar and matched my perceived experience. When I felt poorly rested after tossing and turning early in the morning, the Fitbit Air reported the same. The one exception was the night I fell asleep on the couch and then moved to the bed; the Air logged my sleep straight through, not identifying the brief wake-up. (Quirks like this may soon be fixed, though, as Google says it’s working to address early known bugs in forthcoming updates.)
With the app, I could easily review stats from my workouts, from the distance of my runs to the time I spent in different cardio zones during a weightlifting session. The Air can auto-detect certain workout types, like the handful of walks it auto-logged for me. It lets you start a workout manually, too, using a list of dozens of activities, from rowing to in-line skating, but you have to pull out your phone to do that. This is slightly more of a hassle than on my Apple Watch, where I can easily do so using the display.
You need to make sure your phone is with you if you want to log the route for a run or ride because the Air doesn’t have built-in GPS.
The other big tradeoff? You can’t see real-time workout stats, which makes the Fitbit Air a less-than-ideal training partner at times. During a run, I couldn’t glance down at my mileage or heart rate, which made it harder to pace. But the Google Health app makes it possible to sync data from other apps and devices, like, say, a Garmin smartwatch or the Strava app.
How Long Does the Battery Last?
I have to charge my Apple Watch daily and miss out on sleep tracking most nights because of it, and here’s where screenless trackers really shine. The Fitbit Air lived up to its weeklong battery life claim in my trial run. In fact, after a full week, it still had 25 percent juice, which felt heroic compared with the dwindling battery performance on my years-old smartwatch. Plus, the Air charges fast—from zero to 100 percent in about 90 minutes or to a day’s worth of charge in roughly 5 minutes, Google says.
Other screenless devices last even longer per charge, according to manufacturer claims—the Whoop 5.0 for at least two weeks and the Amazfit Helio for up to 10 days—but we haven’t tested those metrics in our labs. Still, if you’re considering switching from a traditional smartwatch with near-daily charging, this once-a-week pit stop feels like a big gain, letting you get more out of your device, including easier sleep tracking, with less hassle.
The Air’s charging cable has a USB-C connector on one end and a pronged charger on the other. It’s easy to use yet still annoying to have to add another proprietary charging cable to the mix in your home.
Is the Fitbit Air Worth It?
After my trial run with the Fitbit Air, I was decidedly pleased, especially given the accessible $100 price and the ability to dodge the subscription fee. The weeklong battery life felt luxurious, and the revamped Google Health app was straightforward and fairly motivational. As someone focused on general wellness, I gained insight into patterns that affect my health, from sleep to recovery—and, honestly, I could easily do without all the “AI insights” offered in the Google Health Premium plan.
At the same time, I can see the tracker being too basic for an athlete with an intense or regimented training program, especially one who relies on GPS during workouts and real-time stats to monitor performance. Of course, the same can be said of other screenless trackers, like the Whoop and Oura Ring. But if you want a break from buzzing gadgets—and you don’t want to be saddled with a subscription fee—the Fitbit Air offers largely the same health and fitness insights of its competitors at a really reasonable price.
