Ever since Google, Fitbit, and Steph Curry began teasing a new wearable without a screen that could compete with WHOOP and Amazfit, I’ve been sort of obsessed with finding out more. That first tease has led to far too many slow-motion video recap sessions of a basketball player that has spent his career causing nothing but pain to this Blazers fan.
I’ve been on the hunt for more because this device is exactly the type of device I’ve fallen in love with in recent years for fitness and health tracking. I currently wear both an Oura Ring and WHOOP MG because I truly appreciate their advanced metrics and also because the last thing I need on my body is another screen to distract me from life. So, when we got a small look at the new screen-less Fitbit, I started digging.
Fitbit, at least to me, has one of the better fitness and health tracking experiences of anyone and I’d love to move my world of health tracking to it. Unfortunately, I just don’t love current Fitbit devices. The Pixel Watch 4 is fine, but again, it’s the screens I don’t care about. Battery life on devices without screens is also typically measured in multiple days, not hours.
Fast forward to today, and I got motivated to find more since it has been a few weeks since we heard anything. After hours of looking through Steph Curry’s online world, I think I’ve discovered some stuff and at least uncovered a bunch of really clean shots of the device.
Here’s the first one!
Looking back through both Instagram and YouTube, as well as images posted to Getty, it looks like Steph has been testing and wearing this device publicly since early January. He had it on during a lengthy home stand and was for sure wearing it during warm-ups against the Sacramento Kings on January 9. He continued wearing it through the NBA All-Star game in February and then into March, where he first acknowledged that Google and Fitbit had a new device they’d like to sell to us. Honestly, over the past 4 months the guy only seems to take this thing off during games, and I’m assuming that’s because the NBA won’t allow him to wear it then.
Thanks to a video shared by Sotheby’s, where Steph Curry announced that he is auctioning off a collection of sneakers that he has warn in recent months since entering sneaker free agency, we get a bunch of clean 4K close-ups of the device.
The device is incredibly thin if you compare it to something like the WHOOP. In fact, this looks like it is significantly thinner than the WHOOP MG I have on my wrist, which is a major improvement.
The band itself, or health bracelet, appears to be a single and lengthy band that wraps around your wrist, through a metal loop and over the sensor, to then attach to itself. The material looks almost identical to the Pixel Watch Performance Loop Band in the Peony color. That band is made of recycled polyester, nylon, and elastane yarns.
As far as capabilities or the name of this new Fitbit without a screen, we just don’t know. We have that tease from March 31 and all of these appearances from Steph without any other info to really go on. I did uncover a software experience that I’d imagine will be a part of this device, though.
During a workout over the All-Star weekend, Steph was again wearing the new Fitbit. At one point during the workout, the camera points to a Pixel phone leaning up against a wall that is showing workout tracking software. Now, I don’t know what this software is, but it certainly looks a lot like the Fitbit fitness tracking UI on a Pixel Watch. The “pause” button at the bottom is identical.
In these screens, someone has fired up tracking where they have connected to a device that is providing “Live data” and is at 38% battery. It’s labeled as a “Sport” activity and shows cardio load, heart rate, energy burned, and elapsed time of the workout.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong here, but I don’t believe the Fitbit app can currently do this. It can initiate only a handful of live activities, but they require the activities to be GPS. This looks like a “Sport” activity activated with live data, and that would make sense, since this new Fitbit does not have a screen to display this info from. My guess here is that this is an early look at software that’ll accompany this new device. WHOOP does something very similar to this.
And I think that’s mostly it for now! Again, I’m so excited for this device that I’m determined to find out everything I can and share it with you.
