distracting

Google has presented the Fitbit Aira $99.99 fitness tracker with no screen, no notifications, and no watch. It collects data 24 hours a day, dumps it into an app, and disappears from your wrist. This is where the product announcement ends. The interesting thing is that the Fitbit Air is the fourth, perhaps the fifth, on a list that is getting longer and longer. What has happened. Whoop created the category ten years ago. Polar launched its Loop in September for $199. Amazfit released the Helio Strap for 99.99. Garmin has a bracelet called Cirqa in development, according to leaks. And now Google is joining in with a product that costs one hundred euros and shows absolutely nothing. Everyone’s approach is practically identical: A plastic capsule with optical sensors placed in a textile strap. No screen, no buttons and no notifications. A mobile application where, if you feel like it, you can look at the data. Why is it important. We have been convincing ourselves for eleven years that more screen equals better device. The Apple Watch won as a format for its applications, its notifications, its ability to respond to messages… that is, its approach as a wrist-worn mobile phone with a certain focus on health, but also on quick procedures and notifications. And it turns out that we now have products whose success is measured the other way around: by how little you remember that you are wearing them. Whoop got more than 2 million subscribers paying between $199 and $359 a year for a bracelet that doesn’t even tell you the time. Let Google enter this format already having its own PixelWatch It says a lot about the size of the public for whom the smartwatch does not serve. The context. The easy narrative is that people are tired of the screen on their wrist. But the reality is more diverse. We could say that there are four different profiles buying these products for different reasons, and only one fits the idea of ​​being fed up. The athlete or biohacker who already has a sports watch for training but doesn’t want to sleep with it. The screenless bracelet is your second device, light and almost invisible. Anyone who has never wanted a watch with a screen. Because it has a mechanical one. You have never contemplated an Apple Watch or you had one and abandoned it. Now you can measure your body without giving up the jewelry. The smart ring userespecially women, which combines aesthetics with cycle, sleep and temperature monitoring. The underlying logic is the same: clockless data. The normal person who does not play sports and does not want to carry anything every night or anything that overwhelms or distracts him. A 100 euro bracelet with seven days of battery life opens the door. Between the lines. The bracelet is an answer to the problem that smart watches have brought us: turning the wrist into another window of interruptions. Its great commercial virtue is precisely that renunciation of the screen. By not competing visually with anything, it stops competing with any other accessory you are already wearing. mechanical watch, AirPods Pro 2ring, whatever. Zero conflict. Go deeper. Then comes the question of the reader who is not an athlete or biohacker: What exactly is this for? Dream. It’s not about knowing that you’ve slept six hours and twenty-three minutes, but about detecting trends. Many people believe that they sleep seven hours and discover, when measuring, that the actual time is much less. This pushes us to correct specific things: go to bed earlier, don’t have a late dinner, avoid the drink that breaks the deep phase… Resting heart rate. An isolated value is not useful, but the trend over months is. If your heart beats faster than it did half a year ago, something is happening: stress, worse fitness, a brewing infection, etc. Heart rate variability (HRV or HRV). This metric helps explain how well your nervous system responds to effort and rest. It tells you when to train hard and when to stop. Cumulative effort. Especially in order to see the pattern. The bracelet doesn’t tell you what to do. It gives you context about your body and you decide. And now what. The Fitbit Air will not be the last. Garmin will presumably bring out the Cirqa this year. Apple could end up making a move in some similar format if demand for these devices continues to grow. AND Whoop will continue to defend its subscription model against four rivals that make it difficult for it. For ten years, the success of a wearables was measured by engagement: The more you looked at the screen, the better. If the next wave decides to learn to disappear altogether, the smartwatch as we know it has a bigger problem than you think. Featured image | Google In Xataka | After almost a decade with the Apple Watch, I have switched to a Garmin. And I understood what I was missing