Three Things I Already Love About the Fitbit Air
I just received my Fitbit Air review unit, and while I can’t give you a full review yet, I’ve already held the device in my hands and tested the new Google Health app, which will soon replace the Fitbit app. I’ve already liked a lot about it, which surprised me a bit. I had high hopes, but not too high. Here’s what I’m seeing so far.
The Fitbit Air fitness bracelet is small and lightweight.
The Fitbit Air looked small and light in photos, but I imagined it mostly on the wrist of a basketball player . In person, it truly matches the photos perfectly. The Fitbit Air has an 18mm strap, which is much thinner than other smartbands, and overall, it’s the smallest fitness tracker I’ve used in years (if not my entire life). Here’s a photo of the Air (far right, in “mist”) next to the current-generation Whoop MG . From right to left, the other two devices are the Polar Loop (beige) and the Amazfit Helio (black).
The trainer who was using the Fitbit Air was able to extract data from the screenshot.
The Fitbit Air fitness tracker, like all smartbands, uses a companion app to analyze and display data, so the app’s performance is crucial to the tracker’s usefulness. When I first tried the new app, I had already completed my workout for the day, so I showed my trainer a screenshot of the results from that workout. (I was tracking it on a Coros watch.) The trainer calculated the number of minutes I spent in each heart rate zone, then converted them to Fitbit zones and logged them accordingly.
Google Health’s AI coach may be experiencing fewer hallucinations.
I had terrible problems with the early version of the Google Health Coach app. The hallucinations were intense, and even last week, my memory problems remained terrible. The app would persistently execute what would have been just a fleeting thought just a few months ago (“I’d like to do more reps in my workout”), even if I went into my “coach notes” and deleted the memory. But after trying the new version of the app, I haven’t had any significant hallucinations and no intrusive long-term memories—at least not yet.
I also noticed that the trainer performed as advertised. When I asked it to log my Hyrox workout , it indicated it started at 8:00 PM (current time). When I asked it to update that time to 6:00 PM, I didn’t immediately see the update and thought it was another broken promise—but a minute later, I noticed that the update had indeed occurred. More testing will be needed to determine whether the trainer always does everything correctly or if I was just lucky, but it certainly seems to work better than what I saw in the public preview.