My experience with the Fitbit Air after a month - Igor Kulman

Smartwatches haven’t appealed to me for years. I used to have an Apple Watch Series 2, but eventually got rid of it and went back to mechanical watches. One of the reasons was that I didn’t really know what to use it for.

I have notifications disabled for all apps on my iPhone, but I use icon badges for some of them, so the Apple Watch didn’t make much sense to me as a notification device.

The other part was the fitness features. Tracking steps and activity, closing rings and getting various reminders mostly annoyed me and sometimes made me feel an unnecessary need to keep checking the numbers. Mechanical watches don’t do any of that, and more importantly, I simply enjoy watches themselves much more.

Over the past few months, however, I’ve started exercising more regularly and adjusting my diet with the goal of losing a bit of fat and gaining some muscle. Suddenly, some of the data I had ignored on the Apple Watch years ago started to interest me. Mainly my daily activity, step count, heart rate and at least a rough estimate of my energy expenditure.

Buying a smartwatch just for that was out of the question, as I still want to wear my mechanical watches on my left wrist. So I started looking for a simple fitness tracker without a display.

A fitness tracker without a display

One option is the Oura Ring, a small ring with sensors for tracking activity and sleep. I don’t wear rings at all, though, and I’m not particularly interested in buying a relatively expensive device only to then pay a recurring subscription to use it.

Closer to what I was looking for is Whoop. It’s essentially a simple strap with sensors and no display that collects data while everything else is handled by the app. The problem is, once again, the subscription, which the entire Whoop model is built around. I already have more than enough subscriptions and definitely don’t want another one just for a fitness tracker.

In May 2026, however, Google introduced the Fitbit Air, which is conceptually very similar to Whoop. It’s a small fitness tracker without a display that costs around €100 and doesn’t require a recurring subscription for basic use. Google does offer Google Health Premium, but the basic features I bought the Fitbit Air for work without it.

The Fitbit Air measures heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), blood oxygen saturation (SpO₂), skin temperature and movement. It uses this data to calculate things like step count, calories burned and sleep data. It has no display and most of the time you don’t even have to know it’s there, which is exactly what I was looking for.

The one thing that made me slightly hesitant about buying it was Google. The company has quite a history of killing products and services, so I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if the Fitbit Air ceased to exist a few years from now. For around €100, however, I was willing to accept that risk and give it a try.

Wearing it on my wrist and ankle

The Fitbit Air isn’t officially sold in the Czech Republic, so I ordered mine from Amazon Germany. As expected, I started wearing it on my right wrist, since my left wrist is reserved for mechanical watches.

The Fitbit Air itself is small and light, so it doesn’t get in the way much. Even so, after a while I started finding it slightly annoying to have something on both wrists. I therefore tried moving it to my ankle, which turned out to work surprisingly well.

When positioned on the inside of my ankle, heart rate measurement works without any problems and I actually prefer wearing it there to wearing it on my wrist. I barely notice the tracker during the day and, more importantly, I don’t have to wear something on each wrist.

Step counting works surprisingly well too. When comparing it with other data, the results were reasonable enough for me to be happy with them. The Fitbit Air is obviously not designed to be worn on the ankle, so these results need to be taken with a certain amount of caution.

The biggest problem with wearing it on the ankle is sleep tracking, which becomes much less useful.

Sleep tracking

Sleep tracking is probably the part of the Fitbit Air I trust the least. The device tracks movement, heart rate, HRV and other metrics and tries to use them to determine not only how long you sleep, but also the individual stages of sleep.

In my case, the results are often quite strange. Sometimes even the time I fell asleep or woke up is wrong, so I don’t put much weight on figures showing how much time I supposedly spent in REM or deep sleep. It’s even worse when wearing the Fitbit Air on my ankle, where it sometimes fails to record sleep properly at all.

Interestingly, independent Fitbit Air tests have been fairly positive about its sleep tracking. Compared with other devices, it produces a fairly similar estimate of overall sleep duration, although there are more significant differences when it comes to individual sleep...