Transcription
This is the Fitbit Air, and I've been wearing it for about two weeks now to test out the sleep tracking, the heart rate accuracy, the activity tracking, and everything else that you would need to know before buying this device. I did pretty much everything you could with this watch, from working out, traveling internationally, going through time zones, getting sick, drinking alcohol. Literally anything that a watch would track, I've done it in the past two weeks. It's been a wild two weeks.
But I want to start off with just the design, the fit, and the comfort. I promise it's really interesting once we get into the accuracy tracking, but I think this is probably the most important part: the fit and the comfort.
Looking at the design, there are several different bands or straps you can get. And to swap them out, the actual Fitbit Air device is inside here. It's just this little tiny puck here. The battery life on it is rated for 7 days. And from my experience, I got almost exactly 7 days with this.
You'll see that there's no display. That's kind of the whole point of this. You're not going to get notifications. You're not going to get any feedback on this with two small exceptions. One, there's a small LED light on the side that can tell you when the battery is low. So, if you double tap it, it'll blink. It'll blink white. That means the battery is like over 20 or 50% or whatever. I'll show you on screen. It blinks amber if it's under 20%, and it flashes if it's like 1%, pretty much dead.
The other thing this can do is it has a small haptic motor in there. So, the vibrating motor is going to be used for a low battery alert, but mainly it's going to be used to wake you up in the morning if you want to use this as an alarm. But it's not just a regular alarm. You can actually set this as a smart alarm. So, you can set it and say, "I want to wake up at 6:00, but wake me up at the optimal time based on my sleep that is just before 6:00." And in my experience, the haptic motor is very clean. It's plenty strong for myself, and I find it a really pleasant way to wake up. You simply tap the band, and that'll turn off the alarm.
So, there are three different bands or loops, as Fitbit's calling them, that you can put on here. And uh, there's going to be more, I'm sure, aftermarket, but at least at launch right now. The one that I've been using for the past 2 weeks, which I absolutely love, is called the performance loop. That's this one right here. There's also elevated modern. I don't actually have that one. And there is the silicone one, which is called the active band.
But looking at this one right here, like I said, this is very, very comfortable. Of all the fitness trackers I've ever worn, this is very likely the most comfortable one, which is kind of the whole point of this in the first place. People say, "Why do you want a fitness tracker with no display?" The main thing is you want a long battery life and you want a small, very comfortable device that can track your sleep and track your health 24/7.
So, when you put this on, the first thing that I mentioned in my original uh, first impressions video is it's a little tricky to uh, put it on, but I've really gotten the knack for it now. All you do is use one finger to hold the loop down and then wrap it around. So, it covers the band. It covers the Fitbit itself. And I find that from most angles, you cannot tell that it is a fitness tracker. Some people were worried that when you hold your wrist straight on, there's small gaps. I personally don't wear these things particularly tight. I find that they're perfectly accurate when they're a little bit more loose, and I get a lot less fatigue. But if you really tightened it down, you can very easily have essentially no gap on your wrist on the edges there. But I, I don't think most people even see that anyway.
Also, because you're not taking this off, some people may not even take it off when you shower. It is rated for water. You're good to swim with this. You're good to wash your hands and shower and everything. And the band actually dries rather quickly. In fact, significantly faster than the band on my Whoop, which I'm talking about in a full comparison in another video.
I've actually been wearing this with several other bands for the past two weeks. I've been wearing the Whoop MG, the Polar Loop 2, and the Amazfit Helio. All of those are really an interesting comparison. And if you want to see the full in-depth comparison, be sure to subscribe. That video is coming out in the next couple days. I'm just wrapping up the final touches on that data.
Anyway, back to the design here. Two thumbs up. The only thing that I can complain is the charger for this is a unique and new charger. It's not the same charger as the Pixel Watch or really anything else, which means if you're charging this once a week, I'm almost definitely going to be losing this little charger. So, I'll probably have to buy some more to have around or maybe just keep it in one spot and hope I don't lose it. But I do appreciate the magnet strong enough, and this is light enough that you can charge it. It could hang off of something. Uh, I threw it in my backpack and had it charging, and it, I didn't have problems with it coming off. I think that overall it did a good job. I do wish it had, you know, a little USBC thing on there or something, but hey, if that's what keeps it smaller, I'm fine with that.
But let's talk about the accuracy. After really wearing this for 2 weeks, how accurate is it? The first thing I want to look at before getting into sleep tracking is going to be the heart rate accuracy during workouts. If you go for a run with this, how's it going to do? Honestly, I have really nothing bad to say. This did an excellent job with an R value of 99 and an R squared of 98. That's a a correlation. So, in statistics, higher value closer to 1.0 is better. And this one being 0.98 is absolutely incredible. I was comparing this to an ECG. It's a Polar H10 heart rate strap. Goes around your chest. It is much, much more accurate than most uh, optical heart rate sensors. And so seeing this perform so closely to that, I think is very, very reassuring.
You'll notice that there are some slight delays with intervals, especially when starting and stopping. That's very typical for optical heart rate sensors. And this lag is probably best visualized with the gap chart. So looking at this, you'll see there are some spikes upwards of like 20 or 21 beats per minute, but very, very brief. And that's really only when your heart rate changes drastically because you just started or stopped an interval or a run. I've also tried this with weightlifting, cycling, and many other workouts. And from my experience, it actually does a really good job. It stays on very well. And despite having such a simple little sensor array on the back, it seems to do a really good job.
As far as GPS accuracy, well, this one is actually not related to the band at all. A lot of people might wonder, "How do you track your workouts with GPS?" And the thing is, you're going to have your phone with you. You can use this without your phone. You can leave your phone at home. It's going to track steps and movement, but you won't have any tracking of distance and where you're actually going unless you bring your phone with you. So, GPS accuracy is going to depend entirely on which phone you have. The good thing is a lot of phones are fairly accurate these days.
As far as step tracking accuracy, this is something that I actually don't usually do with a lot of smart watches, but because this thing, I think people wearing this are going to care a lot about getting your 10,000 steps a day, more of the basic everyday health stuff. And I have some interesting observations with the step counting. First of all, I woke up every day uh, with some steps on the clock. This morning, I woke up with 80 steps. I don't walk in my sleep. It should be zero. So, there are some phantom steps, like where it detects a step that it's not actually a step. Also, I tracked 1,000 steps. I did this test twice. I just counted 1,000 steps. And the first time this registered 967, so a little bit of a discrepancy there. The second time was almost dead-on at 994 steps, which I think is really quite positive. And as far as the entire day of walking and just tracking my steps, I found that, I mean, comparing this to the other three fitness trackers, like I said, full in-depth video coming soon. But a little sneak peek here, this band was never the highest or the lowest. It was always in the middle, which I think is generally a good sign, and I suspect that it is fairly accurate in counting steps.
Now, so far, we've had almost nothing negative to say about this. Very accurate heart rate, very comfortable, good battery life. Uh, step counting seems to be pretty good as well. The sleep tracking, this is a little bit more interesting. So, comfort, the sleeping with this, awesome, great experience. I never even realize it's on my wrist. But as far as tracking goes, like I said, I've done a lot in the past couple weeks that really test out the sleeping. Sometimes maybe I tested it more than I should have, but the good news is when I'm at home, it actually tracked really well and it accurately depicted when I was asleep, when I was awake. It had the overall time also. Uh, I don't know if you can hear in my voice, I feel good today. I might have like a little bit of lingering like congestion. I, I feel fine, but probably two or three days like literally the past two or three days I was not doing well at all. And looking at this, you can see we have two different metrics that I like to look at. We've got the sleep scores and the readiness score. So the readiness score, I think did a much better job of actually tracking how I felt in the morning, which makes sense. And if we look at that in the past week, it says mostly low, which is true. And you can see the four days where I was pretty sick, I was down bad, really. Um, and one thing that I think is interesting though is I felt like I was progressively getting better every day. Like I, I probably Saturday and Sunday were the worst two days, but Monday and Tuesday, I felt like I was feeling a little bit better in the morning. And yet, this showed a very consistent just level 15 recovery score every single day. So, I don't know if it's not really as granular as I would like, or if I just didn't recover as well. And maybe I was getting used to not feeling so great. Uh, but that was kind of weird to me that it didn't slowly move up as I expected it would.
Also, in the sleep tracking, you'll see it gave me surprisingly good sleep scores. So, sleep is going to be prioritizing different things than the recovery. Recovery is a lot more based on your heart rate and your heart rate variability, which if we look at those, small tangent here, if I go into heart rate and heart rate variability, that did exactly what I thought it did. That's what it felt like where was kind of gradually getting a little bit better. My heart rate variability was improving as I was healing a little bit. And same thing with resting heart rate, that was gradually going back down as I was starting to feel a little bit better or recover from my sickness. But the recovery score as a whole again kind of flatlined at 15 and then jumped up today to a much higher score.
As far as the sleep score goes, this is like I said, prioritizing very different things here. If I look at my one-week trend, it's kind of all over the place. It prioritizes much more like what time you go to bed, how regular that timing is, and how long you were sleeping. So, looking at this right here, you can see apparently I was in bed for long enough and I was not too restless or anything. Except last night, even though I feel so much better today, last night was not as good of a sleep score as the previous two nights when I was more sick and felt less healthy, but I stayed in bed a little bit longer. So, I guess what I'm saying here is for me, I would put so much more value on the readiness score than I would on the sleep score. I think a lot of people care about sleep, but the sleep score, I got, I'm a little bit iffy about it to be honest.
And I guess this is kind of a good segue into the app in general. I'm going to show you a lot more about the app throughout this video, but if I tap on sleep, uh, I can then go down to the sleep quality, and I really like these four metrics. It shows me the time to sound sleep. It gives me my average range, and you can see right now I'm in the middle of that, 14 minutes. That's good. You can also see sound sleep. So, this is going to be like your deep sleep and your REM sleep. It adds up and shows like again, that was in range, so it's green. It shows you restlessness, which is kind of a good, like I like how it summarizes this, and these are really useful metrics so you can say, "All right, maybe I was more restless because it was too hot or the bed's not comfortable, or maybe I had more interruptions last night." It really explains why you might not have a good sleep score and what you can improve in your sleep just from these right here. Maybe time to sound sleep is because you ate before you went to bed or something like that.
Uh, one more aspect to sleep tracking that was not a particularly strong point for this device is nap tracking. If you take a nap, it usually works, but not always that well. A lot of times if you take a nap for like 25 minutes, it might only capture like 15 minutes of that. It might not even record it at all. I found this was a big problem when I was traveling and I was sleeping on planes, like, you know, redeye flights. It was kind of like a nap here and there. Uh, it really didn't do a great job with that.
In fact, traveling in general with this was kind of a disaster. As I went through different time zones, I crossed the date line. I went from uh, Pennsylvania to Japan. So, I was interested to see how this watch would handle it. And it literally just deleted some of my sleep on the plane. It didn't know when to count certain things. There were nights that it gave me zero sleep, other nights it gave me good sleep when I actually didn't sleep. Uh, I think that it was kind of a big miss. And like I said, I talk about that a lot more compared to the other devices. Most devices struggled with that. There was one device that actually did a surprisingly good job. So, if you travel a lot, this is not going to be very good at that. In fact, it also didn't know what to do with times. It said that my sleep was very consistent even though I was on a 12-hour time zone difference. Like, it just did not really account for time zones.
Now, when it comes to tracking workouts, I mostly did a lot of walking. Like I said, I was traveling in Japan and uh, many of the walks were tracked and it gave me nice insights in that. It knew my speed. Is able to give really interesting insights into that and say, for example, like I'm coming off a torn hamstring and uh, it's saying like, "Oh, you're walking faster than you did last week when you're just casually walking around, indicating your hamstring is probably recovering." And I thought that's really interesting because I would have never looked into that data, and it's that's the kind of thing that AI is actually very helpful to tell me. It learns from what you do also. And so if you're doing a lot of different types of exercises, it'll automatically start tracking a number of different types of workouts. But again, it's going to learn more from your specific habits and what type of workouts you do. And you can also give it feedback. And if it tracked one and it was wrong, you can go in the app and very easily change that.
What I do for any kind of lifting or running though is I go in and I manually start it. So, if I tap on start, I simply choose which one I want, but it doesn't let me like get ready. Like, as soon as I tap on it, just starts right away. Counts down from three and it starts going. I wish it was like a loading page where you could then tap start when you're ready, like get your music ready, choose the right kind of workout. Uh, it doesn't do that. Also, when you're done, if you accidentally started the wrong workout, you can't just like discard the workout. So, I have this connected to Strava, which is a little bit awkward. When I accidentally start a workout, uh, and I'm like, "Oh, no, that's not the right one." And I stop it. Well, now you just recorded a 5-second run that's definitely getting published to Strava. All your friends and followers are like, "What? What's going on with that?" Uh, most other devices, if it's any kind of workout of any duration, when you stop it, it says, "Do you want to save it or do you want to discard it?" You don't have that option with this. This is kind of an odd quirk.
And I guess while we're here, I might as well go through the rest of the app. There's a lot that I really like, some things that I really don't like. Starting off with the very top. I love this right here. Having the charts, you can customize what this shows based on what your goals are. Whether that's weight loss, uh, just getting more active, training for like a marathon or something. I think most people training for marathons would probably use a different device, but a benefit of of Google Health here is that you're able to port in a lot of different data from many different sources. So maybe, for example, I want to look at like my heart rate. I can go into readiness score. I can then go down to my heart rate variability and on the top right I can tap on the three dots, say view sources, and it shows me all the different sources that are connected to this, and I can choose, "All right, maybe I just want to look at only the Fitbit Air data." I could do that. If you have maybe an eightle mattress or anything from Amazfit, all these different different uh, platforms, they can all connect to this, and you can aggregate your data in one location, and you can choose which data you're actually looking at. So I think that is a huge positive of the app. Also, like I said, I love the charts up top. I've got my steps, my readiness, and my sleep. That's what I really care about. Uh, I can then swipe through. It kind of swipes a little fast. You have like, you know, a number of other things. You have your calories, the floors you go up and down. This device just is not capable of tracking floors. It just always says zero every day. So, a little bit of a downside. I wish this was able to count staircases, but I actually don't know how they normally do that. I always assumed it's accelerometer, but maybe it is barometric pressure. That's the main thing I really like about the app.
Scrolling down then on this little today tab. Uh, it's kind of a lot of like AI paragraphs. Some of these insights are very useful. Like I said, it could say like uh, I told it that I had a hamstring injury and it said, "All right, well, you know, it's really hot out. Make sure you drink a lot of water." Yeah, I already kind of know that. That's AI. Whatever. Um, it tells me maybe you want to slow down because you already did a lot of working out today. Um, scrolling down past that, you get another little block of like useful graphics. So, I kind of wish this was above the insight. Or I wish the insight was smaller. I don't know. I feel like this is just like a clumsy cluttered UI in my opinion. Like it asks me like, "Oh, how are you feeling right now?" And you have to say like, "Oh, it's feeling a little better." Or whatever. You can reply and talk to AI. That feels like I don't want that there. I don't know why it's there. Anyway, useful charts down here. But look at this quirk. You have last night's sleep and then last night's resting heart rate and heart rate variability. But if I scroll down even further, you get the night before with the night before sleep and sleep score, but last night's heart rate and heart rate variability. Like these numbers don't match. You think this would be the heart rate and heart rate variability from two nights ago as the sleep scores from two nights ago, but it's not. It's last night's heart rate and heart rate variability, if that makes sense. It's a mismatch on what it's actually showing. So, that's redundant data there, and I don't know why they're showing that. Also, you saw I had to scroll past a number of other just paragraphs. Some people may really like these insights. I think that you should at least like collapse them and get rid of them. This just feels like kind of just like AI slop to me where you just have non-stop paragraphs. Like I'm not going to go and read through all of this when I'm trying to get a quick idea of what my health is like for the day.
Also across the bottom then if we go to fitness, you can see this is actually pretty good. I like this. They've got your workout library there. If you want to go through one of their kind of exercise programs, you can start a workout. On the top we have the recent workouts you did. So you can go and tap into like today's run or today's lifting. And within each one, not a ton of data here, at least not with weightlifting, but I mean it shows me enough. It shows me pretty much everything I would really expect. It's not doing like rep tracking necessarily. Uh, but nonetheless, it's showing me, you know, some pretty decent data. Going down, you've got your key metrics in terms of cardio fitness, calories burned, your resting heart rate, your V02 max, running distance, like all these different things. I think this is pretty well done. I actually really do like this tab. I just wish I could get rid of the workout library. I'm not personally a user of that and I would like to customize this a little more and just get rid of that. In case you can't tell, I really like the numbers and the charts. I love this stuff right here. I want more of that and I want less of not that.
Basically, if we go into sleep tracking, again, this is pretty solid. I think that this tab is pretty good. Uh, at the bottom, just like some general videos and meditation stuff I guess you could do. I'm never going to do that. Uh, but you know, it's there. I think this is actually the best way AI should be implemented. I like how they have a small paragraph at the top kind of explaining what's going on and what you should do. And then you can scroll down and just get all data and graphics. Over in health, again, this one, all graphics. You already know I'm going to like this page. That's really solid.
The last thing I want to talk about in the app is at the top left. Uh, you can tap on that and you get some basic settings to see if your device is connected and make sure it's synced. Now, there is a subscription optional for this. You may have seen from the headlines or maybe from my previous video. The device itself is $99. You may pay extra for another one of the bands or whatever, but you own the device and all the data that you're getting from the device. But you do potentially have to pay $99 a year if you want to get the AI stuff integrated into this. Personally, I cannot wait to get rid of the AI. I, I'm so excited to get rid of this little free trial subscription so I can get rid of all these paragraphs. And I really hope you just have a simplified interface with just numbers and charts. I would absolutely love that. And while it's useful for some people to ask questions about your health, I just feel like this is a little bit overdone. I'd rather have the chat in the corner and just ask questions. I think Whoop does a great job of balancing AI that's helpful without being in your face.
So this is a fairly simple device. Google added a lot of AI and a lot of features into the app. Some things I really like. There's a lot to really like about this, but there are also some weird bugs, some weird quirks that I think Google kind of needs to work out. Like I showed you with where it shows last night's heart rate when it's trying to show last night's sleep score. Like some things are mismatched like that. I think that's kind of weird that it does that. Also, TCX files. So, you can export your workouts. I really appreciate that. But you can only do it if it's like a run or something outside that moves and has GPS data associated. If you're lifting indoors, you can still go on the app and you can still export it, but it's just an empty file. Like, you won't have any heart rate data in there at all. I don't know why. The other quirk, like I said, is the inability to discard workouts at the end. You have to save the workout and then you can go back and delete it later. Another weird quirk.
But this device as a whole, I think that for Fitbit people, people who want to track their steps, track their health, and just kind of keep general tabs on how their sleep is, this is the perfect Fitbit device. I know so many people that have a little small watch like an old-school Fitbit or a Mi Band. And they're great that they show you time and display and everything like that, but I think a lot of people would be perfectly happy sleeping with this as something subtle and comfortable and lasting about a week and then seeing all the data in an app and then maybe on their other wrist they can wear, you know, a regular watch or something that's more stylistic of whatever they really like or maybe even just an Apple Watch that they only wear during the day.
So, I'm a big fan of the Fitbit Air, but is it actually the best alternative to Whoop? Well, you're going to see in that video. I think I think most people are going to be surprised. I think you actually would be surprised by the verdict I have in that video. So, thanks for watching, guys. I'm really excited to see you in that next video. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss it.