I have a Garmin on one wrist and a growing sense of guilt about fitness app subscriptions I keep paying for and barely using. So when the Fitbit Air landed, I was curious whether it would add to that pile or actually replace something. After a week wearing it, the answer is more interesting than I expected.
The Fitbit Air is a screenless fitness band priced at €99, built to feed data into Google’s new AI health platform. It tracks heart rate, SpO2, sleep stages, heart rhythm with Afib alerts, and general activity, all from a tiny pebble that sits so low on your wrist you genuinely forget it is there. The old Fitbit app has been rebranded as the Google Health app, and paired with a new Google Health Coach built on Gemini. That combination is where things get genuinely interesting.
Who Google is actually targeting here?
This is aimed squarely at Whoop. The screenless form factor, the recovery focus, the subscription model sitting behind the hardware. Google has looked at what Whoop built and identified the gap it left wide open.
Whoop’s problem is that it pitched itself at elite athletes, secured the brand ambassadors and the pro sports partnerships, and then priced and presented itself in a way that puts the actual data out of reach for most people. The metrics are dense, the learning curve is steep, and you are paying between $200 and $350 a year, every year, for a device that becomes completely useless the moment you stop. That is a punishing business model when the real audience is mostly enthusiastic amateurs who wanted to feel like professionals.
Google has spotted that gap, the space between total beginner and borderline obsessive athlete, and planted a flag right in the middle of it. The Fitbit Air does not try to out-Whoop Whoop. It offers something more accessible, more legible, and considerably cheaper. At €99 for the device and €9.99 a month for the full coaching experience, the maths are just different. And if you already pay for Google AI Pro, which bundles 5TB of storage, enhanced Gemini access, and a range of other benefits into a single plan at €174.99 a year, Google Health Premium is included at no extra cost. For anyone already in that ecosystem, fitness coaching does not become an additional line item. It just appears, already covered. For me personally, that meant one less subscription rather than one more, which changes the conversation entirely.
To be honest, the aggressive price is not purely altruistic. Google is a data company. It always has been. A subsidised fitness tracker that sits on millions of wrists collecting health data around the clock is a very Google-shaped ambition. Should you be worried about that? Probably a little, yes. But every fitness tracker on the market is monetising your data in some form. At least with Google, you know the scale of what you are dealing with.
The branding confusion nobody needed
Before we go any further, something needs to be said about the setup experience, because it is baffling for a company this size.
Google has retired the Fitbit name from the app and replaced it with Google Health. Fine, that makes sense as a long-term brand play. But they have simultaneously called the physical product the Fitbit Air. So you open the box, see Fitbit on the device, go looking for the Fitbit app, and it does not exist anymore. I spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out what I was supposed to be downloading before I worked out it connects through the Google Health app, moved it to my home screen, and got on with it.
There is no user experience logic behind that decision. If you are retiring the Fitbit brand, retire it. If you are keeping it, keep it. Doing both at once just creates confusion, and it will trip up plenty of less patient buyers who will assume something has gone wrong with their setup.
The AI coaching is the real product
Once you are past the setup, the experience is genuinely impressive in ways I did not anticipate.
I sleep with headphones on, which means it takes me an age to actually drift off. The app flagged the long sleep latency and we tested introducing a sleep timer to cut the audio before I fell into deeper sleep phases. Within a few nights, my sleep score improved noticeably. A few days later, the Coach brought it up unprompted, referenced our earlier conversation, and explained why it had worked. We had been testing using Spotify podcasts at bedtime with a timer to cut out to give my brain a break in.
Even the fact I’m saying “we” is wild.
That kind of continuity, an AI that remembers the context you gave it and follows up with results, is not something I have come across in a consumer health product before.
I also told it about the Gym Monster 2 I have at home. No native integration exists between the two, but the Coach went away, figured out what the machine could do, and built workouts around it. That is AI doing what AI should actually be doing, filling gaps intelligently rather than just presenting you with data and leaving you to interpret it alone.
I have had a personal trainer in the past. The gap between that experience and what the Google Health Coach offers is smaller than I expected it to be. The more context you give it, the more useful it becomes, and it adjusts in real time. Travelling this week, knee playing up, work schedule a mess. It adapts. That flexibility is the whole pitch, and it delivers on it.
Battery life and day-to-day wear
The battery is excellent. Up to seven days between charges, with a five-minute top-up giving you a full day if you are pressed for time. For a device Google wants you to wear through sleep as well as exercise, this matters, and it holds up in real use.
The form factor helps too. The pebble is small and light enough to genuinely disappear on your wrist. The Performance Loop band that comes in the box is comfortable through workouts and overnight, but there is one thing worth flagging before you get too attached to it. It is fabric. I wear my wearables in the shower to keep them clean and free of sweat build-up, and the Fitbit Air came with me without a second thought.
What I did not account for is that fabric holds water the way a small towel does. I sat down on the couch afterwards and spent the next five minutes wondering why my t-shirt was inexplicably soaked. If you shower with your tracker, the silicone Active Band is the smarter daily choice. The fabric loop is genuinely comfortable, but it needs a few minutes of airing out before you put a sleeve over it.
There is also a more dressed-up Elevated Modern Band if you want something that does not read as a fitness tracker at a glance. The Stephen Curry Special Edition at €129.99 is a co-designed version of the Performance Loop in rye brown and game-day orange, and it looks considerably better than it has any right to at that price.
One common complaint I have with this, similar to what I have with Garmin, is that it is a proprietary charger that comes in the box and I am so sick of this happening. Yet another cable that in a matter of time will break or I’ll lose and I’ll just go back to my Garmin or something else because I have the cable for it. It’s frustrating that companies always find a way to use proprietary chargers and not USB-C, which should be the standard.
Could this replace MyFitnessPal?
Possibly, and that surprised me. Nutrition logging through the Coach lets you photograph a meal and have it broken down automatically. Cycle tracking, mental wellbeing, and hydration are all rebuilt into the same experience. The more you consolidate here, the less you need elsewhere. I can see a version of this where someone cancels two or three separate subscriptions and lands in a genuinely better place. For a lot of people, this will not be one more subscription. It will be one fewer, but only if you’re smart about it.
The one barrier
The Fitbit Air has no screen, and that is a deliberate design choice. It keeps the form factor slim, the battery long, and removes the notification loop that turns most smartwatches into distraction machines. I understand the logic completely. Now it does still have an alarm but no screen.
But it means this is not a watch. You cannot check the time, see a message, or glance at your pace mid-run without your phone. It can’t double up for payments or anything like that. I have owned the Pixel Watch and a couple of Garmins, and I keep coming back to the same conclusion. I don’t know if I’m ready to give up the watch face.
That said, I am increasingly aware that what I love about my Garmin is the watch face, not the health insights. Going into the Google Health app and having what I can only describe as an AI companion dad talk me through my day has been a bigger pull than I expected. I am not ready to declare the Garmin dead, but the gap between what it offers and what this offers is narrowing faster than I thought it would.
That extra context that the AI coach gives you around specifics that you give is nothing short of amazing. Wearing two devices is not really the answer. The more useful question is what you actually want from a wearable in the first place, and whether the thing on your wrist is genuinely delivering that.
The Goosed verdict
I’ve gotta be honest I wasn’t excited about this product coming over, but it has overdelivered massively on what I expected.
The Fitbit Air is a smarter device than its price suggests, and the Google Health Coach is the thing that makes it worth talking about. The AI coaching, when you lean into it and give it context, produces something that genuinely feels like a personal trainer rather than a glorified step counter. The sleep tracking is excellent, the battery is class, and the form factor is about as unobtrusive as a health tracker gets.
The missing screen is the real dealbreaker for anyone who wants one device to do everything. And the branding decision, shipping a product called Fitbit Air that connects to an app called Google Health, is the kind of own goal that makes you wonder who signed off on it.
At €99 with three months of Google Health Premium included, it is a well-priced entry point. Google’s long game is clearly the subscription revenue, and the data that comes with it, but they have built a product that makes the subscription feel worth paying. It’s absolutely worth noting that the tracker will work without a subscription, without as much detail, but this is a lot more than can be said for Whoop.
For anyone already on Google AI Pro, it is essentially free after you purchase the device itself. That is a clever move, even if the name on the box is still causing unnecessary confusion.
The Google Fitbit Air is available now for €99.99, with the Stephen Curry Special Edition at €129.99.
