Three things I already like about the Fitbit Air

I just received a review unit of the Fitbit Air, and although I can’t give you a full review yet, I now have the device in my hands and have tried out the new Google Health app that will soon replace the Fitbit app. There’s a lot I like about it already, which surprises me. My hopes were high, but my expectations weren’t high. This is what I am seeing so far.

Fitbit Air is smaller and lighter

From the photos, I could tell that the Fitbit Air looked small and light, but I was mostly looking at it on a basketball player’s arm. In person, it really lives up to the photos. The Fitbit Air has an 18-millimeter strap, which is thinner than anything you’ll see on any other smart band, and overall, it’s the smallest fitness tracker I’ve used in recent years (and probably ever). Here’s a photo of the Air (on the far right, in the “Fog” colorway) next to the current generation Whoop MG. From right to left, the other two devices are a Polar Loop (beige) and an Amazfit Helio (black).

Left to right: Amazfit Helio, Polar Loop, Whoop MG, Fitbit Air
Credit: Beth Skwarecki

Fitbit Air’s Coach was able to pull data from screenshots

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

The Fitbit Air, like all smart bands, relies on its companion app for data analysis and display, so app performance is critical to how useful the band really is as a tracker. I had already done the workout the day I first tried the new app, so I showed the coach a screenshot of my results from that workout. (I tracked this on a Qoros watch.) Coach tracked the number of minutes I spent in each heart rate zone, then converted them into Fitbit zones and logged them appropriately.

Google Health’s AI coach could make you hallucinate less

I had a terrible time with the early version of Google Health Coach. The hallucinations were bad, and even like last week, the memory problems were terrible. It would insist on following something as an order that was just a thought months ago (“I want heavy singles in my workouts”), even if I went into my “Coach Notes” and deleted that memory. But since trying out the new version of the app, I haven’t noticed any significant hallucinations, and at least so far no long-term memories.

I also saw that I was able to do what the coach said. When I asked it to log my HighRocks workout, it logged it as starting at 8 pm (current time). When I asked for the time to be updated to 6pm, I didn’t immediately see the update and thought it was another broken promise – but a minute later, I saw that it had indeed been updated. More testing will have to be done to see if the coach Always Works fine, or if I’m lucky, but it certainly seems to work better than what I saw in the public preview.