Google Fitbit Edge review: Stuck in the middle

Over the last few months, my priorities in wearables have changed. I’ve realized I don’t care about having Gemini on my wrist, multiple ways to reply to notifications, or even a robust app ecosystem. I simply want a wearable that’s comfortable on my wrist, lasts multiple days on a single charge, and offers a health/fitness tracking suite I enjoy using.

As such, I was really looking forward to the Fitbit Edge. Taking the week-long battery life of the excellent Fitbit Air and giving it a proper touchscreen — all while retaining a small and lightweight design — sounded like the perfect combination. And in some ways, it is.

But after living with the Fitbit Edge for a little over a week, I can’t help but feel disappointed. There’s a lot Google got right here, but between a shocking number of missing features and a lackluster fitness tracking experience, the Fitbit Edge has proven to be a trickier recommendation than I had hoped.

One of the best things about the Fitbit Air is how supremely comfortable it is. You’d think that magic would be lost on the Fitbit Edge due to its display, but the knock-off effect is shockingly minimal.

While the Edge is technically heavier and takes up more space on the wrist, it’s still an extremely svelte piece of hardware. I barely realize I’m wearing it most of the time, and it slides under long sleeves without a problem. It’s honestly kind of amazing just how compact the Edge looks and feels.

But what about the elephant in the room? What about the display? It’s good!

The Fitbit Edge has a 1.3-inch AMOLED panel with always-on display support and Gorilla Glass 3 protection. It’s not a screen that’s going to set the world on fire, but it gets the job done. I haven’t had any issues reading the display on multiple outdoor walks/runs during a very sunny Michigan October, and the touchscreen responsiveness is excellent, too. I do wish there were an automatic brightness sensor, but even without one, the Edge’s display has served me well.

Battery life has also been extremely good. Google promises up to seven days of use per charge, and that promise is right on the money. I got to the end of day seven with a little over 10% battery remaining, and that included six tracked workouts, more auto-detected workouts, and wearing the Edge to bed every night for sleep tracking. I also really appreciate that the charger is the same one used for the Fitbit Air, and that the Edge’s battery is fully user-replaceable. Good job, Google.

Having said all of that, I’m not totally thrilled with some of the smaller hardware details.

On the right side of the Edge’s body is the one and only button. I certainly prefer my wearables with more physical controls, but there’s just not that kind of room on a body this small. It is a good button, but that means most of your interactions happen with the touchscreen — something that’s not always ideal during workouts.

I also don’t love that the Edge introduces yet another proprietary watch band system, and it’s one I’ve not been particularly impressed with.

Google sent me a few different colors of the standard “active band” — black and olive — to accompany the fog color that came with my review unit. The black band picks up oil and hair like you wouldn’t believe, while the olive band has to be jammed into my Fitbit Edge to attach properly, almost as if something’s slightly off with its connector.

This is pretty disappointing for watch bands that start at $40 and go all the way up to $160 (!!) if you splurge on the metal link version. I suspect we’ll see more affordable third-party options over time, but don’t expect a ton to choose from right away.

It’s one thing for the Fitbit Edge to have solid display hardware, but what about the software? You may enjoy looking at the screen, but will you enjoy interacting with the OS it showcases? For the most part, I think you will.

The Fitbit Edge doesn’t run Wear OS (it has its own custom operating system instead), but it shares a lot in common with Google’s smartwatch platform. Swiping left and right on the watch face shows your customizable tiles, swiping down reveals your quick settings, swiping up shows your notifications, and pressing the side button opens your apps menu. If you’ve used Wear OS within the last couple of years, you’ll be right at home.

Whether it’s starting workouts, scrolling through my tiles, or clearing notifications, the Fitbit Edge has felt perfectly fast and responsive. It also looks good, drawing some UI inspiration from Material 3 Expressive. However, while the Edge handles these things extremely well, it also lacks many fundamental “smart” features.

As you’ve probably heard by now, there’s no NFC chip, which means no Google Wallet support for paying with your wrist. For context, this was a core feature of the Fitbit Charge 6 when it launched three years ago. There’s also no microphone or speaker, meaning you can’t reply to texts with your voice, accept phone calls on the Edge, or get audible alarms or workout alerts.

Those are perhaps the biggest omissions, but I’ve also been annoyed by some smaller details, too. There’s no calendar app on the Fitbit Edge. You can’t customize watch faces or tiles on the Edge itself; you have to use the Google Health app for that, and it’s surprisingly clunky to do so.

Most settings (such as AOD and accessibility options) also can’t be accessed from the Edge. You can’t assign custom actions/shortcuts to the physical button, and you can’t customize the workout list in the Exercise app at all — which often results in a lot of scrolling to find the workout type you’re looking for.

I didn’t go into the Fitbit Edge expecting a fully-fledged smartwatch experience, and you shouldn’t either. But the things I’m describing aren’t exclusive to high-end smartwatches — they should be table stakes for just about any fitness tracker, especially one that costs almost $200. Some of these things could be corrected with software updates, but the experience right now is pretty lacking.

When it comes to health and fitness tracking, the Fitbit Edge is considerably more feature-rich. I suppose that’s to be expected, but it’s still good to see how much Google crammed in.

All of the usual suspects are here: step and calorie tracking, sleep tracking, all-day heart rate monitoring and heart rate variability, SpO2 tracking, a skin temperature sensor, and an ECG app. There’s even an altimeter so you can track the floors you climb throughout the day (something the Charge 6 lacked), plus IP68 and 5ATM waterproofing.

Casual, day-to-day health tracking with the Fitbit Edge is solid. Heart-rate accuracy appears to be right on point; the Edge is extremely comfortable to wear in bed for sleep tracking, and it automatically detects multiple workouts without a hitch. If you’re buying the Edge to slap on your wrist to keep an eye on your health in the background, it excels.

Unfortunately, if you’re even slightly serious about manual exercise tracking, this is where the Edge has left me pretty unsatisfied.

My two primary workouts are running and strength training, and neither one is particularly enjoyable on the Fitbit Edge. On the surface, run tracking should be great — there’s built-in GPS, custom goals based on distance, time, or energy burned, and targets you can set for either your pace or HR zone. These things are all great, but once you start running with the Fitbit Edge, you realize how limiting the rest of the experience really is.

There are no vibration alerts to speak of; not for mile splits or goal progress. I set a 6.22-mile goal for one of my runs, and I had to keep checking the Edge to see how much progress I was making because the tracker just doesn’t send those alerts. You also can’t customize the workout screens. Since there’s no default screen that shows heart rate zones and your pace on a single page, I had to scroll back and forth between them throughout the entire run.

Adding on top of that, GPS accuracy just isn’t very good. On that 6.22-mile run, the Fitbit Edge tracked 6.25 miles, whereas Strava and my Amazfit watch tracked 6.42 miles. Having run that same route multiple times over the years, I also know just from my personal experience that the Edge was undercounting.

What’s the issue with strength training? The Edge doesn’t support tracking individual sets, reps, and weights, which means missing out on a lot of valuable data. The Pixel Watch 5 will support this more detailed tracking at some point in the future, but there’s no word from Google on whether it’ll ever come to the Fitbit Edge. Given there’s no technical limitation preventing this, it’s rather frustrating.

I suppose I should also talk about Google Health. Just like the Pixel Watch and Fitbit Air, this is where all your health data from the Fitbit Edge is stored. I was pretty disappointed with Google Health when I used it earlier this summer, and I was curious to see how it had changed a few months following its big launch.

While Google Health is far from perfect, I’m happy to report that it is noticeably better today than it used to be. The “expanded view” for your focus tabs is a great touch, and customizing these tabs is easier, too. AI summaries for workouts, sleep tracking, and other health updates are much less wordy, and I appreciate that you can turn these off entirely if you prefer. Google has also squashed some of the most annoying bugs, such as missing or slow-loading maps from outdoor workouts.

I still wish Google would find a better way to present health data on the Today page that’s less centered on AI blurbs, and interacting with the Health Coach remains hit-or-miss (though it is more reliable than it once was). But those critiques aside, I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed using Google Health more than I expected.

I simply want a wearable that’s comfortable on my wrist, lasts multiple days on a single charge, and offers a health/fitness tracking suite I enjoy using. That’s what I said at the top of this review, and the Fitbit Edge comes so close to meeting all of those things. But in its current state, it’s simply too undercooked and missing too many features for me to keep wearing it as my wearable of choice.

Not having a calendar app on the Edge or restricting so many settings to the Google Health companion app are annoying, but I’d be willing to overlook those things if Google really nailed the health/fitness experience. But the fact is that it didn’t. While many parts of it are very good, not supporting basic workout progress alerts or customizable exercise screens — paired with pretty lackluster GPS accuracy — throws that argument out the window.

I get that some people may point out that the Fitbit Edge is “only” $180, and therefore I should set my expectations in check. But compared to what else is out there, I’d argue that the Fitbit Edge is fairly overpriced for what it actually offers.

The Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 can be purchased for less than $60 at the time of writing, and it offers a similarly robust health tracking experience in a compact body, with even longer battery life and a much larger screen. There’s no built-in GPS, but considering how bad the Edge’s GPS performance is, I don’t think that’s a huge loss. And if you don’t mind stepping up to a more traditional smartwatch design, the Amazfit Active 3 offers significantly more robust workout tracking (especially with running and strength training), built-in GPS, four physical buttons, a microphone and speaker, plus a 1.32-inch AMOLED screen with sapphire glass — all for just $170.

The only real reason to buy the Fitbit Edge over one of these competing wearables is if you’re committed to using Google Health. But even then, I’m not sure buying the Fitbit Edge instead of the Fitbit Air ($99 at Amazon) or a Pixel Watch is the right move.

If you just want something for casual health tracking, the Fitbit Air feels like the better choice. It’s substantially cheaper, offers health features extremely similar to the Edge’s, and the simplicity of its screenless design comes with its own benefits. Pixel Watches are expensive, but if you can find a good deal on a Pixel Watch 5 ($399 at Amazon) or Pixel Watch 4 ($349.99 at Amazon) — which should be easy during the holiday shopping season — the benefits are tremendous, both in smart features and workout tracking.

In my initial hands-on with the Fitbit Edge, I said I thought Google might have found the sweet spot with its latest wearable. But having now actually used and lived with it, I think it’s more accurate to say that the Fitbit Edge feels stuck in the middle.

It’s certainly not the worst wearable you can buy, but whether you’re looking at alternatives from different brands or from Google itself, the Fitbit Edge doesn’t make a strong enough case for choosing it over those other options.