Tag Archives: Google

Your Fitness Tracker Has Too Much Screen, The $100 Fitbit Air Has None

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Most fitness trackers have followed the same design logic for years: a screen on the wrist that flashes step counts, shows incoming messages, and turns the whole device into a smaller, sweatproof version of your phone. That approach has its fans, but it also has a ceiling. Screens add bulk, drain batteries, and tempt you to keep checking things you probably didn’t need to check while trying to fall asleep.

Fitbit Air is Google’s answer to what a fitness tracker looks like when the screen comes off entirely. It’s the smallest Fitbit ever made, weighing roughly five grams on its own and about 12g with a band, and it has nothing on its face except a slim oval housing made from recycled polycarbonate. No display, no haptic button, no notification feed; just sensors doing their job quietly and continuously.

Designer: Google

That doesn’t mean there’s less happening inside. The Air carries an optical heart rate monitor, a three-axis accelerometer and gyroscope, red and infrared sensors for blood oxygen monitoring, and a device temperature sensor. Together, these maintain a continuous record of heart rate, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, oxygen saturation, and sleep stages, while also flagging irregular heart rhythms along the way without any input from the wearer.

Wear it to bed, and it tracks sleep stages through the night without lighting up or buzzing. Take it through a workout, and it recognizes the activity automatically. The battery lasts up to seven days under normal use, and a five-minute top-up adds another full day when the charge runs low. Water resistance reaches 50 meters, so showers, swimming, and sweaty training sessions don’t require a second thought.

The data flows into the Google Health app, which is where the Air actually earns its keep. Built on Gemini, Google Health Coach reads everything the tracker has collected and turns it into something genuinely useful: personalized recommendations, recovery guidance, trend analysis, and answers to specific questions about why you might be feeling tired after travel or how to adjust training around an injury, all based on your actual biometrics.

The app works the same way with Pixel Watch, meaning the Air can slot into an existing Google wearables setup or work entirely on its own. Wearing both simultaneously is supported, health data syncs automatically, and the app lets you sort metrics by device. For someone who already carries a Pixel Watch but wants continuous overnight tracking without the bulk of a full smartwatch, the Air fills that gap neatly.

Fitbit Air is available for preorder at $99.99, with first shipments scheduled for May 26. That price includes three months of Google Health Premium, which unlocks full access to Health Coach. After the trial, continuing the service runs $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. A Stephen Curry Special Edition runs $129.99, and interchangeable accessory bands start at $34.99, compatible with Android and iOS.

Compared to other services that charge nothing upfront but require a subscription from the start, the Air’s $99.99 entry price is a more accessible way in. As a device you’re genuinely not meant to look at, its value lives almost entirely in the software behind it; the band gathers, and Google Health interprets. For a tracker specifically designed to be forgotten on the wrist, that’s a quietly compelling arrangement.

The post Your Fitness Tracker Has Too Much Screen, The $100 Fitbit Air Has None first appeared on Yanko Design.

Google’s $99 Gemini Speaker Is About to Land

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The smart speaker category has been quietly stagnating. Go ahead and look around your house. Chances are there’s a Nest Audio or an Amazon Echo gathering dust on a shelf, doing exactly what speakers did in 2018 but with a fresh coat of AI marketing layered on top. It still feels like a tech product, which is to say, it still looks like one. Google seems to have noticed.

The new Google Home Speaker, officially arriving spring 2026 at $99.99 and heading to 19 countries, is not a Nest. That’s the first thing worth saying. Google dropped the Nest name entirely, and the shape that went with it. The speaker is round, compact, and wrapped in a 3D-knitted eco-friendly fabric that reads less like a gadget and more like something you’d find alongside handmade ceramics and artisan candles on a design blog. Google is calling the colorways Berry, Hazel, Jade, and Porcelain. Those aren’t accident names. That’s homeware language, not consumer electronics language.

Designer: Google

That shift matters more than it might seem. The naming tells you exactly who Google is designing for now, and it isn’t the person who organizes their cable management. Porcelain and Hazel are colors a person picks when they’re thinking about how something looks on a bookshelf, not which one has the best specs. Whether the average buyer consciously registers this or not, the vocabulary of the product positions it closer to a Muji lamp than a mesh Wi-Fi node. For a category that has long been aesthetically stranded, that’s a meaningful move.

Underneath the fabric, the hardware story is genuinely interesting. The Google Home Speaker is built around Gemini for Home, which means it isn’t running a legacy assistant clumsily retrofitted with new AI layers. It has custom processing designed specifically for Gemini’s computational demands, meant to make conversations feel faster and more natural. A new light ring gives visual feedback as Gemini listens, thinks, and responds. The speaker also delivers 360-degree sound and supports stereo pairing. At $99, that’s a competitive package, especially compared to what Amazon and Apple are currently offering in the same price range, which hasn’t changed much in years.

Here’s the angle that gets underplayed in most coverage: Google built this speaker to coexist in an ecosystem that’s already expanding before the device even ships. Walmart’s Onn smart speaker appeared in CSA Matter filings in early May 2026, suggesting a budget tier of Gemini-compatible hardware is on its way. Google confirmed last October that Walmart’s Onn devices would work within Google Home. A $99 Google speaker alongside a cheaper third-party Gemini option creates a layered ecosystem where entry-level users get into the platform and those who want a more refined experience buy the Google-branded version. That’s a smarter market play than Google has made in this category in years.

What makes me take this launch seriously isn’t the hardware alone. Amazon has Alexa, which has gone through its own AI reinvention but still carries the aesthetic baggage of the cylinder era. Apple’s HomePod is excellent and priced accordingly. Sonos is navigating its own turbulent chapter. None of them are shipping something that looks like a river stone, costs $99, and runs a genuinely current large language model. Google, for once, doesn’t have obvious company in that specific lane.

The question I keep sitting with is whether the design conviction will hold once the product is actually in people’s homes. It’s easy to look good in product shots, and the Nest Audio looked great too. But if Google has genuinely committed to positioning this as a home object first and a gadget second, and if the Gemini experience inside it is as conversational as promised, then spring 2026 could mark something worth paying attention to.

The smart speaker had a moment, then it plateaued. A pebble-shaped $99 AI speaker with pastel names and a language model built for conversation might not sound revolutionary. Compared to what’s been sitting on kitchen counters for the last five years, though, it kind of is.

The post Google’s $99 Gemini Speaker Is About to Land first appeared on Yanko Design.