The Google Fitbit Edge is Google’s latest fitness tracker, and it’s designed as a halfway house between the screenless, super-cheap Google Fitbit Air and the full-fat Google Pixel Watch 5 smartwatch. Costing $179. 99 / £159. 99 / AU$269, it’s packing GPS (which the Air doesn’t) and Fitbit’s improved automatic activity detection, alongside the usual metrics like heart rate, sleep tracking, and estimated calories burned. But is it accurate? That’s the big question. While we found the Google Fitbit Air accurate compared to the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and a heart rate monitor, we’ve been burned by Fitbit in the past, with some accuracy issues plaguing this device’s spiritual predecessor, the Fitbit Charge 6 . I’ve only been testing the Edge for a couple of days, but I wanted to test its mettle straight away. On my first 5km run with the new Fitbit, I compared its stats on one wrist against another wearable, the high-end Garmin Fenix 9 Pro . The 9 Pro costs around five times as much as the Google Fitbit Edge, and has been tested against chest-mounted heart rate monitors and other premium wearables like the Apple Watch Ultra 4 to determine accuracy. It’s worth noting that devices normally take a few days to learn your movement patterns and baseline metrics, so I was expecting some deviation in metrics such as heart rate. However, I was hoping the Google Fitbit Edge’s distance and pace information, calculated via GPS, would cleave closely to the Fenix 9 Pro’s metrics, as that would indicate the little fitness tracker is almost as accurate as the powerful Fenix 9, making it good value for money. The results
(Image credit: Future) When I compare wearables during workouts, I use the average heart rate metric as a good indication of wearable accuracy…
