A Reddit post on Friday put a name, a battery figure and a launch window on a Google fitness tracker: Pixel Watch AURA, 12 days between charges, out later this year. None of the three came with a source. Gadgets and Wearables ran the image through three AI-detection tools, which returned probabilities between 97 and 99 percent that it was generated. Detectors are not infallible, and compression, editing and unusual product renders can fool them, so a high score on its own settles nothing.
The stronger test was the software. Gadgets and Wearables pulled apart the Google Pixel Watch app, version 5.0.0.958206140, and the Google Health app, version 5.06.1, and found no device called Pixel Watch AURA in either. Google Health does contain a standalone AURA entry, and following it through the app puts it alongside blurred vision, sensitivity to light, numbness and vertigo, which makes it a migraine. An APK search is much better at finding something than at proving it is absent, and Google could keep an unreleased device out of a public build. Underneath all of it there is a device nobody has explained: an unidentified wearable with a small colour display turned up in a couple of Google's own Pixel 11 ads earlier this month, and nobody has worked out what it is. Google rates the screenless Fitbit Air for up to a week, so 12 days from a tracker with an active display is the number that would need the most explaining.