A strong case for minimalism and ditching your smartwatch

Fitness tracking bands never fully disappeared, but they definitely stopped being interesting for a while. At some point, everything became either a mini smartwatch trying too hard to replace my phone or a wellness gadget for people who refer to bedtime as “recovery” instead of “the best part of the day.”

Then Google set its sights on passive tracking and launched a wildly affordable WHOOP 5.0 alternative. My first impression of the Air after 48 hours was that Google might actually be onto something with passive tracking again, and after a few weeks of wearing it, that early take mostly held up. The first-gen screenless tracker is not perfect, but it gets a good amount right at a hard-to-beat price.

The biggest compliment I can give the Fitbit Air is that I routinely forgot about it. It’s roughly 25% smaller than the already slim and long-forgotten Fitbit Luxe, but the bigger difference is psychological. Without a screen vying for my attention or constant notifications buzzing on my wrist, it has the impact of a staple hair tie rather than a needy Tamagotchi.

At just over 12g, it’s also extremely comfortable. Like any review device, I slept with it every night, and wore it through a variety of workout types, but I also kept it on for beach days, travel days, long work days at my desk, and a Sunday spent almost entirely in my bed, plus one particularly messy chalk session with my toddler.

I personally preferred the nylon strap over Fitbit’s alternatives, though if you forget to take it off for the shower, it’s gross when moist. It’s flexible and neat enough by day and was easily my favorite option for sleep tracking. If you can’t stand the sound of Velcro, the Active style works better for sweat and moisture, and the Elevated is classy on the wrist. I’m fairly confident we’ll also see plenty of third-party options flood Amazon in the coming weeks. Passive tracking only works if a device disappears into your routine, and the Air nailed that for me. I found it even more comfortable than my smart ring, which is saying something because I typically forget I’m wearing that as well.

The tradeoff, of course, is functionality. If you live for live workout stats or often skip songs you regret adding to your playlist, the Air will feel inadequate. I did find myself double-wristing a smartwatch multiple days when I knew I’d need quick access to notifications or messages. I also never got used to looking for the time only to remember the Air doesn’t show it, but that says more about me than the device. For the most part, the Air’s minimalism is genuinely refreshing.

Beyond comfort and simplicity, the biggest feature contributing to the Air’s convenient experience is battery life. Fitbit claims up to seven days of use between charges, and mine landed just shy of that estimate. Compared to smartwatches, the runtime is luxurious, though I’m surprised the company wasn’t able to push that spec even further. Quick-charging adds further convenience with about a day of power available in around five minutes. A top-up to 100% took about 100 minutes, though mine slowed down when it reached 99%.

I won’t touch the frustration I feel about the charger not being the same as the Pixel Watch line’s because I could spend the rest of this review complaining about excessive proprietary chargers.

Finally, in terms of compatibility, the Fitbit Air is a device for the masses. It can pair with both Android and iOS phones and can even be used simultaneously with Google Pixel Watches if you’ve already bought into that lineup.

While the design is what got me to keep wearing the Fitbit Air, the sleep tracking is what ultimately won me over. The Air tracks sleep stages, overnight heart rate, blood oxygen trends, skin temperature changes, movement, and sleep consistency, and the app makes sleep data approachable, pushing a nightly sleep score and at-a-glance graphics. Most importantly, the actual data was highly reliable compared to my control devices.

The Air consistently recognized when I genuinely fell asleep versus when I was just lying in bed scrolling, and overnight wakeups lined up closely with reality. It caught the nap I snuck in while recovering from strep throat, as well as the many overnight bathroom breaks I took after drinking gallons of Gatorade to survive said strep throat.

Sleep scores also felt fair, with bad nights showing up as bad nights, and the tracker generally reflected how rested I actually felt the next morning. That sounds obvious, but it’s something a number of wearables still struggle to do consistently. Fitbit has been good at sleep tracking for years, but the Air might be the company’s best sleep tracker available simply because the whole experience is so unobtrusive.

You can also set alarms on the Air and wake up with a purely haptic alert. This is my favorite way to use wearables in bed because I can wake up without waking up my partner, who is borderline nocturnal.

Outside of sleep, the Air’s sensors handle heart rate and heart rate variability trends, stress tracking, and temperature changes, as well as irregular, high, and low heart rate notifications. The Air’s stripped-back approach does mean sacrificing a few advanced health tools. like ECG support, no on-demand spot checks, and again, no display for quickly checking metrics on-device. The trade-off for limiting wrist distractions is that you will end up heavily relying on the companion app. If you want a more medical-adjacent wearable or more information on demand without your phone around, something like the Google Pixel Watch 4 will still make more sense.

Ever since the early Fitbit Versa models, I’ve recommended Fitbit as one of the most approachable ecosystems for casual health tracking, and that’s largely because of how the company presents data. The new Google Health app continues that trend and does a fine job making health metrics feel understandable instead of intimidating. Basic wellness and activity data are all presented in a way that’s easy to understand at a glance, and Fitbit’s Cardio Load and Daily Readiness metrics strike a good balance between useful and approachable.

Yet, there are definitely still bugs to work out, and it’s obvious the app remains a work in progress. My biggest complaint, honestly, is that it occasionally swings too far towards simplicity. The streamlined interface will work well for most users, but I wanted more customization options and more data fields up front. Some core metrics are hidden away rather than pinned to the home page as they should be.

If you subscribe to Premium, Health Coach blurbs also becomes the overwhelming centerpiece of the app, and that means slogging through text blocks to find out what’s going on instead of just glancing at raw data. Its usefulness also varied wildly throughout testing.

During the first week, I was recovering from the kind of petri dish level of germs that only toddlers can bring home, and the Coach did a solid job connecting poor sleep, elevated stress, and changes in my routine. Other times, though, it landed dangerously close to the type of ChatGPT-level encouragement that even a mother wouldn’t give. I’ve never been told to prioritize recovery so many times in my life, even after I started feeling better.

Google also never forgets, and I was surprised more than once by the details the Coach would pull from months and months ago. It consistently asked me about a 6-year-old knee injury that I mentioned once in reference to avoiding box jumps, which means for the first time in years, I constantly thought about my bum leg. It also kept dipping backwards into sleep data to confirm that I have never slept enough, which I already know. The Coach chats can be useful, but like with most AI tools, I’m just not yet sold.

On the other hand, I don’t think Fitbit Premium complicates the overall value proposition too much. The core Air experience works perfectly well without paying monthly, and the deeper insights and Health Coach features tucked behind the subscription aren’t deal breakers. At $99 for the hardware, the overall package is very reasonably priced, even if I continue to resent subscriptions on principle.

The fitness experience on the Fitbit Air follows the same philosophy as the rest of the device in that it’s conveniently passive. I used the Air across walks, strength training, treadmill and outdoor runs, cycling sessions, and general daily activity tracking. Unsurprisingly, the lack of a display changes the workout experience quite a bit, but it’s also liberating not to chase color-coded heart rate zones.

Health Coach also bleeds heavily into the fitness experience if you subscribe to Premium, and here the tool is pretty great. It creates and pushes custom workout plans and provides tailored training guidance that all felt fairly thoughtful during testing, especially when tied to sleep and stress trends. Again, though, this is a very encouraging coach, so if you don’t get enough sleep, it’ll stop just short of wrapping you in a weighted blanket.

The actual workout tracking itself is largely heart rate-based and generally reliable, though compared to the WHOOP 5.0, the automatically detected activity types are limited. Still, auto-detection was excellent for runs and walks, though I did catch a few delayed starts here and there for the latter. Cycling tracking also worked well overall. More importantly, since the Air is constantly recording heart rate data in the background, fixing missed workout timing afterward is usually pretty painless. Fitbit also included heart rate broadcasting support to pair the Air with gym equipment and apps like Peloton for live heart rate data during workouts.

Heart rate accuracy itself ended up being a little more mixed during testing. That’s partly because the bar here was unusually high. The Google Pixel Watch 4 delivered some of the best wrist-based heart rate accuracy I’ve seen in all my years of testing wearables, and while the Air shares some of that Fitbit DNA, it didn’t quite stick the landing to the same degree.

Overall, performance was still quite good for a $99 passive tracker, especially during steadier cardio sessions. But there were enough bloopers that I’d hesitate to recommend the Air to detail-obsessed users. One especially rough rowing workout completely missed several heart rate peaks, underestimating my exertion. Runs, meanwhile, were more of a mixed bag. Some aligned impressively closely with my chest strap and comparison devices, while others showed more lag during sharper intensity changes, like the graph above.

Ironically, I consistently recorded better heart rate data using the nylon strap than the sporty Active one. My best guess is that my wrist simply got a more stable fit with the nylon, so the sensor maintained better contact during movement.

Again, the Air rarely lost the plot entirely, and I didn’t experience wildly erratic readings during workouts or lost data, which is the biggest heartbreak for a reviewer. Most shoppers don’t need chest-strap-level precision from a $99 passive tracker, so it’s hard to knock Very Good data just because I was hoping for Fantastic like its sibling smartwatch.

The biggest oversight, though, is easily the lack of onboard GPS. You can manually start a workout and pull in connected GPS data if you want mapped runs or more detailed pace information, but that also means bringing your phone along. For a device that does such a good job of fading into the background, needing to carry a second device during runs feels completely at odds with the experience. I really wanted built-in GPS to be how the Air distinguished itself, if for no other reason than I rarely have pockets.

The Fitbit Air is one of the most interesting wearables I’ve recommended in a long time, and mostly because it understands not everyone wants their health tracking to dominate their day-to-day, or add another screen to their lifestyle. It’s extremely comfortable, aggressively priced, and integrates with a wellness-tracking platform that has a lot to offer.

It’s also not perfect. I wish the heart rate accuracy were more consistent, and the lack of onboard GPS ultimately limits the Air’s running appeal. Ultimately, though, the Air isn’t trying to win over marathon runners or data-obsessed athletes; those shoppers are likely to spend far more than $100 on their wearables.

If you want a comfortable, approachable tracker with excellent sleep monitoring and an established ecosystem, the Air gets a lot right for the price. If you like the band-style form factor but still want some on-wrist data, Fitbit’s Charge 6 ($159.95 at Amazon) adds in Google apps, GPS, and more advanced health tools.