Google Fitbit Air Review: First Impressions After 48 Hours

Knowing that Whoop walked back on their promises of keeping their hardware free forever, angering their entire community in doing so, and also knowing that Whoop are going to IPO later this year, Google decided to drop the Google FitBit Air. A one-time purchase and with no subscription. In 2026, that is wild.

I’ve been using an Oura ring for a number of years now and have had no complaints with it, apart from having to take it off to play guitar or go to the gym, or when I splash water on my face like Maverick did in the first Top Gun only for the ring to crack the bridge of my nose all the time. Small thing like that. So when Google announced their new FitBit Air, I preordered that guy right away.

It arrived promptly on the day of its global release and I tore into the packaging like someone who's never seen packaging before and got to work pairing it up, setting up the frankly shit-looking recently-rebranded Google Health App. Maybe its because I’m so used to how the Oura app looks and works that anything else is just a mystery to me, but the Google Health app looks like a vibe coded proof of concept, if the concept was "poor UI/UX".

Pairing & Setup

(This is using the non-premium features. The £9.99 per month subscription for the Google Health app enables AI coaching, AI insights, and other AI shit. The free version has everything the paid version does, just without all the AI text everywhere)

I paired the FitBit Air to the app I need to start getting used to and like most people on Earth, swiped right down to the bottom of disclaimers and popups and hit accept on everything. Before long, I was ready. The app was there replete with steps, sleep data, heart rate history. The bloody thing wasn’t even on my wrist at this point. After digging around in a whole heap of unintuitive menus, I finally found that I had accepted allowing the Google Health App to draw data from my phones pedometer, and all of my Oura ring’s data. This would’ve been fantastic if I wanted this to happen. I initially wanted the FitBit air to start on its own journey, not knowing anything about me or using previously recorded data from elsewhere. According to the app, I had done around 10,000 steps - I looked at the ‘sources’ break down; 3,000 from the Oura ring and 3,000 from the phones step counter, which apparently makes a little under 10,000. I spent the next 30 minutes looking into how to unlink my Oura ring and phone’s internal step counter and delete all previous history on the Google Health app - only the steps vanished, but everything else remained (after typing out my notes, apparently I took 8 steps, so lets see what happens when I’m waving at people).

The Band

The “performance band” that came with the device has the shittiest Velcro I’ve ever had the worrying dissatisfaction of pulling apart. It just pops off like I'm tearing bargain-bin Christmas wrapping paper. When attaching it, I found and still find myself pinching both sides together to try and make it grip properly. I think the second I whip my hand out of my pocket to snap my fingers along to a jazzy beat, it’ll catch and undo itself. Saying that, after 2 nights wearing it in bed, it’s not caught on anything or so much as lifted up at the end slightly, but that feeling of worry will return the next time I remove the band.

The Walk

After I zeroed the step counter, I readied up my dog and went for my first walk - Google Fitbit Air on my right wrist, Oura Ring Gen 4 on my left index finger, and a Seiko 62MAS reissue on my left wrist. I went along a canal and around the place where I live knowing it usually takes just over 20 minutes if my dog decides she’d like to walk with my instead of stopping to sniff at every actual thing she sees. I was a man on a mission and so was my dog as she did want to stop every four seconds. So as she was there enjoying her meandering, I was walking in a circle so as not to cease my movement and potentially stop the auto workout detect mechanisms on both the Oura ring and FitBit Air.

After getting in and settling down, I opened both apps to excitedly see. The Oura ring Gen 4 tracked my walk to be a 19 minute event burning 64 calories, an 89bmp average heart rate, and 1447 steps. I quickly swooshed on over to my FitBit app and saw nothing other than the stupid data I’ve manually deleted about 58 times and yet still it shows. The steps went up, however. As for automatically registering a workout…no. It didnt. After some annoyed Googling, it turns out it wont auto detect a walk unless its 20 minutes or over. Awesome. I carried on Googling to find out to change this setting and after another heap of nested menus, I found the place where to lower that threshold for everything it could let me. Now my walk will be registered at 10 minutes upwards, which is the lowest it can autodetect. The Oura ring can detect walks even as short at 6 minutes.

The Sleep

My deep dive into the sleep tracking metrics were to quickly screenshot each app, make this side-by-side image, and show you. I’ve not yet fully researched into every minute details these devices can offer, but the numbers were quite a ways off from one another but the graphs almost seem to line up but with the Oura ring noting several instances when I was awake. I don’t, or can’t, remember being awake. To me, being awake means I can operate heavy machinery, write a poem, converse with strangers about topics I have no right to pretend I know about, but in the world of sleep trackers, I think it might mean “movement”.

The First Full Day Morning Walk

I went for the same walk as I did last night making sure everytime my dog stopped to sniff at something, I kept my steps going, like a wind-up solider on a slippy surface. When I got in, I opened the Oura app and my walk was detected right away clocking in at 23 minutes, burning 69 nice calories, and taking 1580 steps. The new Google Health app pinged me a notification as I was on the Oura app, jealously telling me that it too had finally registered my walk. So I went on over there and saw it saved my walk as a 16 minute walk, burning 121 calories, and took 1510 steps. The delta there is quite odd. You'd think that with a watch and my phone I'd at least time my walk to see which device is the most accurate, but I didn't and I fear I never will.

The First Full Day Walk

On my final longer-than-20 minute walk of the day, I get home and again open the Oura app first. As the data loaded in, it picked up my apparent 32 minute walk. I accepted what it told me and moved on to the newly minted Google Health app, forgetting that the app doesn’t autodetect and load activities anywhere near as fast as the Oura ring app does. So, rather upset that the bloody device is not as amazing as I thought it was going to be, I try my hand at manually entering my walk details just for this test’s parity (I’d never waste my time otherwise). As I’m prodding about and entering rough times of the walk I get a notification saying “New workout detected!”. So I dismiss it and set about deleting the manually tracked activity I just saved. Done. Now the notification is gone and the autodetect workout card is nowhere to be seen, I close the app, resync etc. Nothing. So I had to manually add it back in again even more annoyed than I was as currently, Oura is doing a much, much better job.

Initial Thoughts

The next morning, the start of day 2, the sleep scores of Oura and Google FitBit Air we’re almost exactly the same. An 85 sleep score from Oura with a 56 average heart rate bpm, and an 86 sleep score from the FitBit Air with a 57 average bpm, and the graphs lined up better this time around. The Google FitBit Air is still calibrating (which’ll take a week or so of its own data), so this test will remain open, unless I forget.

As it stands, the Google FitBit Air is unnoticeably comfortable. I don’t even realise I’m wearing it, but its still got a way to go, in terms of software, to match up with the ease of use and user experience of the Oura app. For all I know, the FitBit Air’s tracking capabilities are lightyears more accurate than the Oura ring, which has now made me realise why was I even comparing them in the first place. For me, a health tracking ring kind of gets in the way. I never removed my previous Gen 3 ring to the point when it became a slight oval, meaning I had to stamp it down onto its ring-holder charger. Now, I take it off for anything that involves lifting things. Once I get used to the Google Health app and they roll out further updates, I can see it being my primary health tracking device.