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  "description": "I compared the Fitbit Air with my Oura Ring and Apple Watch, and its sleep and activity tracking held up surprisingly well.",
  "path": "/ive-tested-fitness-trackers-for-years-googles-99-fitbit-air-gets-a-lot-right/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-26T13:00:50.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.thisweekstrend.xyz",
  "tags": [
    "Fitbit Air from Google",
    "Oura Ring",
    "Eight Sleep",
    "$99 Google Fitbit Air"
  ],
  "textContent": "The new Fitbit Air from Google ditches the screen to get back to the simplicity of old-school fitness trackers. The irony here is that the Fitbit Air is anything but simple. Google Gemini oozes out of every facet of the Google Health app as it tries to use AI to coach you.\n\nI’ve been testing smartwatches and wearables for over a decade, so I was curious how the Fitbit Air worked in two specific areas. The first was whether it was a suitable sleep tracker, and the second was how it handled my daily running.\n\nUltimately, the $99 Google Fitbit Air is a worthwhile fitness tracker thanks to its consistent results and low price. It has a few flaws, but people searching for alternatives to either a Whoop band or an Oura Ring should give it a look.\n\n## What’s included with the $99 Fitbit Air?\n\nBefore getting into the performance of the Fitbit Air, it’s worth mentioning the optional subscription fee.\n\nIncluded with the cost of the $99 Fitbit Air, you get basic activity tracking, sleep tracking, health tracking, and wellness logging—there are no ongoing costs by default.\n\nThe add-on, Google Health Premium subscription, revolves around AI coaching. You can ask questions about your data and get personalized answers. There are also proactive suggestions across fitness, sleep, and health. For comparison, a required Whoop subscription costs between $199 and $359 per year, depending on which features you want. A subscription for an Oura Ring is $5.99 per month.\n\nIn my initial testing, I actually found the AI coaching to be intriguing enough to consider. I liked some of the little touches, like how it incorporated weather data into planning my running schedule. Of course, I also think that the base tracking included with the device is a good value. At launch, a free trial of Google Health Premium is included with a Fitbit Air, so you’ll be able to give it a try without committing to anything.\n\nProactive tracker notifications\n\n## Sleep tracking with the Fitbit Air\n\nFor tracking my sleep, I compared the Fitbit Air against sleep data from an Oura Ring and an Eight Sleep mattress pod. Despite all of the devices measuring my sleep from different parts of my body, the results were all close each day.\n\nMy sleep tracking with the Fitbit Air was consistent over multiple nights. The morning notifications, explaining how I slept, seemed to accurately reflect how I felt.\n\nThe unfortunate part for me is that the Fitbit Air band wasn’t any better to wear to bed than an Apple Watch. I was hoping the Fitbit Air would be sleeker and less noticeable, but it wasn’t. If you hate wearing devices on your body at night, then the Air will probably still be an issue.\n\nIt’s unfortunate because if you don’t wear the Air at night for tracking sleep, then you lose out on a lot of the holistic value these trackers provide. It’s hard for the system to recommend when to exercise or how much to, if it doesn’t know your sleeping habits.\n\nFor reference, I didn’t like wearing the Whoop band either. Wearing the Oura Ring at night has been the wearable tracker I can tolerate the most. The Eight Sleep is the least intrusive, with nothing to wear. But it’s also the most expensive option.\n\n## Running with Google’s Fitbit Air\n\nThe fitness tracking capabilities of the Fitbit Air cover lots of activities, but I specifically focused on how it worked for my daily running. I let the band auto-detect my running, rather than tell it I was starting a workout, because I leave my phone at home.\n\nThe Fitbit Air wasn’t as accurate as my Apple Watch Ultra in tracking my steps and distance, but it wasn’t very far off either. It did well registering my heart rate and detecting my cardio fitness.\n\nThe Fitbit Air doesn’t have GPS or any buttons on the device itself. It is more limited compared to even the basic Apple Watches, but it is a good passive device. So, while I wouldn’t use it to track my mile times seriously, it does auto-detect and record activity so that the coaching feature can have a full picture of what my day looks like.\n\nPeople already wearing a Garmin or more serious smartwatch for run tracking shouldn’t bother with the Fitbit Air. But people interested in the passive tracking of their activity should consider it more seriously. The Air does work about as well as an Oura Ring or Whoop band, in my experience.\n\n## Is the Google Fitbit Air worth buying?\n\nThe $99 Google Fitbit Air is being heralded as a Whoop killer. That may be the case for some people. The Air does have a subscription price at half the cost of Whoop. But at minimum, without a subscription, the Fitbit Air is still a good distraction-free fitness tracker. I found it to be relatively accurate compared to other trackers and consistent with its own results.\n\nWhether the Fitbit Air works for you as a sleep tracker will depend on how sensitive you are to wearing something on your wrist during the night.\n\nGoogle’s AI coaching might be the biggest question mark of this whole product. In some ways, it’s great and like having someone dialed in to your data. But at other times, it feels like a computer blasting a bunch of text at you. Luckily, there’s a few-month free trial of Google Health Premium, so you’ll have a good idea whether you want to subscribe when the time comes.",
  "title": "I’ve tested fitness trackers for years—Google’s $99 Fitbit Air gets a lot right",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-26T13:59:13.489Z"
}