Google’s taking a big swing at AI health with the Fitbit Air

It’s a Whoop dupe. That was my first thought when I saw the new $99 Google Fitbit Air. You can hardly blame me. The band is screenless with a metallic fabric clasp. My eyes flickered between the Fitbit Air and my wrist, where I’m wearing a Whoop MG. Was I not seeing double? Google’s taking a big swing at AI health with the Fitbit Air Google kicks off a new era with its first Fitbit tracker in four years, an app rebrand, and its AI coach leaving beta. Google kicks off a new era with its first Fitbit tracker in four years, an app rebrand, and its AI coach leaving beta. But as my press briefing went on, my opinion started changing. The Air is sort of like the OG Fitbits that Whoop then duped once Fitbit went all in on smartwatches. Think back to 2012, when the Fitbit One could clip to your pants, be turned into a pendant, or dangle from a keychain. That device was mostly a pedometer, whereas the Air is more of a modern, modular sensor that can be popped out of one band and stuck into one of three others. But in many ways, this feels like a return to Fitbit’s roots — a simple band for casual tracking. “The reality is right now, wearables have made huge advancements, but for a lot of people, they’re still either too complicated, too bulky, or too expensive,” Rishi Chandra, Google’s vice president of health and home, tells The Verge. “That’s where the Fitbit Air came in. We wanted something you could give to your kids and parents that they could just put on their arms. They don’t have to learn anything new.” Compared to previous Fitbit trackers, the Air is 25 percent smaller than the Luxe and 50 percent smaller than the Inspire. It weighs a mere 12g with the band, and 5.2g without. There are no buttons, though there is an LED charging light and haptics for silent alarms. Sensor-wise, it’s not as high tech as the Pixel Watch, but it’s got the staples: an optical heart rate sensor, gyroscope, accelerometer, blood oxygen sensor, and skin temperature sensor for sleep tracking. You can dunk it in water up to 50 meters, and the battery lasts seven days on a single charge. That’s somewhat disappointing, but it was typical for old-school Fitbits, too. At least this one purportedly gets you one day of juice with a five-minute charge. It’ll also work concurrently with a Pixel Watch — meaning that if you’d prefer to wear the latter during the day and an Air for workouts and sleep, you can now. (Recently, Fitbit hasn’t supported multiple devices.) But the Air is not a signal that Google’s reviving Fitbit as it was. This is Fitbit’s first hardware product in nearly four years, but it comes alongside the death of the Fitbit app. Starting May 19th, the Fitbit app and Android’s Health Connect app will be consolidated into the single…