I love swapping out the bands on my Pixel Watch 5 and Fitbit Air, but Google’s official options are not cheap. It doesn’t take long to find a plethora of knock-off Pixel Watch and Fitbit Air bands around the web and, as it turns out, they’re actually really good.

Over the past few generations, I’ve collected a ton of Pixel Watch bands and, at first, that was almost entirely first-party bands. For the first couple of years of Pixel Watch, third-party bands were either non-existent or of terrible quality, but they’ve gotten a lot better.

Last year, I showcased some knock-off Active Sport bands that, for $8, very effectively filled the gap for me while Google’s lineup was lacking some colors I wanted.

Since then, I’ve tried others. The most recent batch is a 6-pack of Pixel Watch bands that are copies of Google’s standard “Active” band. They’re made from silicone, not the fluorelastomer from past generations, nor the “Hydrogenated Nitrile Butadiene Rubber (HNBR)” used on Pixel Watch 5. But, in action, it gets the job done.

The bands sit somewhere between Google’s small and large sizes and slot into the Pixel Watch 5’s mechanism perfectly. If you handed this to me and said it was an official band from Google, I’d probably believe you.

To get this level of quality at such a low price is wild, all while getting colors that, again, Google doesn’t make. I found this while just wanting a purple band, but the price tag pushed me to just buy a whole pack, and the striking deep red included sneakily became one of my favorites.

Source link