Fitbit Vs Google Pixel Watch: Which Has A Longer Battery Life?

One of the greatest advantages offered by dedicated sports and fitness watches is their incredible battery life, often stretching between several days and weeks — something that the best full-fledged smartwatches you can buy running operating systems like Wear OS or watchOS typically don't offer. Pluck the screen out of fitness watches and you could technically save even more battery.

That's exactly the promise the new Fitbit Air — Google's $99 tracker – brings. It's basically this screenless pebble that snaps into a fabric band. This thing weighs just 12 grams with the strap, and yet, Google rates it at up to seven days per charge.

Meanwhile, the Pixel Watch 4 is rated for 30 hours on the 41mm model with its always-on display active. There's a larger 45mm version, too, that stretches it to 40 hours. The same is claimed for the new Pixel Watch 5 as well. Either way, it's lower by a factor of four or five. Now this isn't exactly a fair comparison considering the Pixel Watch runs Wear OS, Google's OS for watches capable of running the Play Store and a whole swath of apps, whereas all the Air does is track your health metrics and beam it to your phone where you can view them.

Now, the Pixel Watch 4 does offer an improvement over the Pixel Watch 3, which delivered up to 24 hours of battery life on a single charge with AOD. But there's still a long way to go here.

On the Fitbit Air, those seven days of use are not just a marketing figure. One reviewer for Tom's Guide wore the Air for exactly one week and finished with 15% left. PhoneArena's review saw it fall from 70% to 29% over four days. That rate projects out to eight or nine days of use, which is slightly higher than the official claim.

That said, the Air is not the only overachiever here. The Pixel Watch 4 (45mm) was found to regularly reach the 48-hour mark with 10-15% still left in the tank, per Android Central. Google also notes that turning on Battery Saver gets the 45mm to 72 hours, or three days. The smaller 41mm model exceeds its rating too. One reviewer for 9to5Google got around 36 hours out of it with 15% left.

Of course, that gorgeous screen is where most of the Pixel Watch 4's power goes. The 3,000-nit AMOLED panel can stay lit all day. Not to mention the watch also carries a speaker, dual-frequency GPS, and an LTE radio on cellular models. The Air carries none of that. There is no display to light, no onboard GPS, and no speaker. It leans on your phone instead for things like location data during outdoor workouts.

Given how different both devices are, they weren't meant to be rivals, and Google doesn't treat them as such. That much is clear from the company's launch post for the Air that suggests wearing a Pixel Watch during the day and swapping to the tracker at night for sleep data.