Three Things I Already Like About the Fitbit Air

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I just got my review unit of the Fitbit Air, and while I can't give you a full review yet, I've now had the device in my hand and have tried out the new Google Health app that will soon replace the Fitbit app. I've already found a lot to like about it, which kind of surprised me. My hopes were high, but my expectations were not. Here's what I'm seeing so far.

The Fitbit Air is small and light

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

From photos, I could tell the Fitbit Air looked small and light, but I was mostly seeing it on a basketball player's arm. In person, it really does live up to the photos. The Fitbit Air has an 18-millimeter strap, which is much thinner than what you see on any other smart bands, and overall, it's the smallest fitness tracker I've used in recent years (and maybe ever). Here is a photo of the Air (far right, in the "fog" colorway) next to a current generation Whoop MG. 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

The Fitbit Air's coach was able to pull data from a screenshot

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

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

Google Health's AI coach may be hallucinating less

I had a terrible time with an early version of the Google Health coach. The hallucinations were bad, and even as of last week, the memory problem was awful. It would insist on obeying something as a commandment that had just been a passing thought months ago ("I'd like heavy singles in my workout"), even if I went into my "coach notes" and deleted that memory. But since trying the new version of the app, I haven't seen any significant hallucinations, and there are no intrusive long-term memories—at least so far.

I also noticed the coach was able to do what it said. When I asked it to log my Hyrox workout, it logged it as starting at 8 p.m. (the current time). When I asked it to update that time to 6 p.m., I didn't see the update right away and figured it was another broken promise—but a minute later, I noticed that it had, in fact, updated. It will take more testing to see whether the coach always does the right thing, or if I just lucked out, but it certainly seems to be working better than what I saw in the Public Preview.

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