Fitbit Edge vs Fitbit Air: The differences beyond a screen

When Google announced the Edge, it shared that the Health Guardian features it introduced on the Pixel Watch 5, covering things like heart health and insulin trends, would also be coming to the Edge and the Air. Because those features largely aren’t dependent on specific sensors and instead rely on the corpus of data Google has collected, it seems plausible that additional AI features could follow a similar path. 

When it comes to what each individual wearable is capable of, though, things get a bit more complicated. Both the Edge and the Air offer things like activity tracking, a daily readiness score, cardio load insights, step tracking, continuous heart rate monitoring, irregular heart rhythm notifications, sleep tracking and a resilience score that approximates stress. The screen and additional sensors on the Edge enable extras, too, like ECG readings, the ability to track the number of floors you’ve climbed and live workout metrics on the built-in screen.

Because the Edge, again, has a display and runs Google’s lightweight Fitbit OS, it can also show more of your health data on-device, receive notifications from your phone and even run a stripped-down version of Google Maps. The Air can’t offer the same without a screen, and depending on your perspective on wearables, you might not want it to.

One of the draws of the Fitbit Air is it’s less in your face: just sensors and a companion app when you want to look at the data you collect. By design, the Fitbit Edge is far more obvious. It’s not a mini-smartphone in the way a Pixel Watch is, but it could be harder to ignore, if that’s something that matters to you.