About a year ago I got the Helio Strap to monitor my steps, heart rate, sleep. Why not the WHOOP? Because I find ALL CAPS annoying and also a $350 annual subscription seems silly. Overall I think for $99 and no subscription the Helio Strap is a great buy. When Google announced the Fitbit Air I was intrigued since it also works without an annual subscription. And with the resources of a trillion dollar company I thought maybe it would be better than the Helio. I was wrong.

The Fitbit Air is marginally lighter but I can hardly notice. It is thinner but again diminishing returns. What’s annoying is the strap design. It goes over the device then loops back, making it awkward to adjust. The Helio uses a more traditional watch like strap.

The Fitbit Air itself isn’t the real issue, though. It’s the app. The Google Health app is horrible. I had a Fitbit account way back, so in order to continue with Google Health registration I had to “migrate” my Fitbit account to Google Health. The process was clunky and I had to do it a couple of times because it got stuck.

With my account migrated I proceed to connect the Fitbit Air. Simple enough. But then I couldn’t get my heart rate data. I looked everywhere and the hear rate related metrics was missing. I had to disconnect the device, logout, reconnect the device a couple of times before it appears.

Still, it only showed my heart rate. Heart rate variability and resting heart rate was “not tracked”. Why is it “not tracked”? Was there not enough data? Was there some connectivity issue? Who knows, it just says “not tracked” without any explanation. My hunch was there wasn’t enough data but it’s extremely bad UI/UX to not explain why it’s not tracked, otherwise you’re leaving the user guessing.

My biggest issue is the overall UI. It’s full of long AI generated text. Who is going to read a 3 paragraphs just to see how well they slept last night? All the AI generated content is so distracting. In addition, the layout is bad, the way the metrics is displayed is bad. It’s just not a very good UI. It feels cartoonish. Maybe I’ll get adjusted to the UI and learn to like it, but my first impression is this is absolute horrible health monitor dashboard. It’s almost as if they used AI to generate the UI without asking for user feedback.

I’ll wear both the Fitbit Air and Helio Strap for now to compare, but unless Google revamps the Health App in the next couple of weeks, or the Fitbit Air has some killer features that the Helio doesn’t, I’ll probably stick with the Helio.