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Last week, a neighbor invited my children over for ice cream. My 9-year-old wanted to walk alone, so she strapped on her Apple Watch and set out with my son. I watched the blue dot rush enthusiastically off. “Baby, you’re going the wrong way,” I texted. She corrected her course, and soon I got a text saying she had arrived safely.
For elementary-school-aged children like mine, smartwatches are an increasingly common stopgap to postpone when I have to give them a phone. Most experts agree that less screen time is associated with better educational and behavioral outcomes, but my household of two working parents and two elementary-aged kids needs a way to keep track of each other. It’s a fine line between wanting my kids to be resilient and independent and, you know, keeping them from wandering off into the next county.
Today, Google-owned Fitbit is launching the Fitbit Ace LTE, a wearable aimed at children over 7 years old, addressing issues in the fast-growing children’s smartwatch market. It has Google’s privacy protections and draws on Fitbit’s health expertise. You don’t have to create another account or add another line to your phone plan. Most significantly, it has a variety of bold, 3D games and characters that are activity-forward, purpose-built for the watch, and meant to keep your kid wearing it more regularly.
The Fitbit Ace LTE costs $230 and will be available in the Google Store and on Amazon on June 5. It requires a Fitbit Ace Pass subscription plan, which is $10 per month or $120 per year—that's more or less how much it costs me to give my kids an old Apple Watch and put them on my Verizon plan. If you’re an Android family with elementary- or even middle-school-aged kids, this could be a good way to get them off the phone.
Games Galore
The Fitbit Ace LTE is a sturdy, but distractingly nice-looking wearable. It’s bump- and scratch-proof, water-resistant up to 50 meters, and has a stainless steel case, a recycled polyester band, a Corning Gorilla Glass screen, and an optional protective bumper. It also has a bright, OLED display and a variety of colorful accessories (more on those later).
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It may be a kids' Fitbit, but it’s still a Fitbit, and many of the company's health features have been made child-friendly. While an adult’s physical activity can be measured straightforwardly, children play hide and seek, jump on the trampoline, or Nerf war each other all afternoon.
The watch has the usual suite of sensors, like the accelerometer, optical heart rate sensor, altimeter, magnetometer, ambient light sensor, and gyroscope. But Google Research worked with experts like Lauren Sherar, a professor of physical activity at Loughborough University in the UK, to create child-specific exercise algorithms and show that movement in a graphic called the Noodle. It's a snake character that slithers around the perimeter of the display until the child has reached the World Health Organization’s recommended 60 minutes of activity per day.
Instead of interval-based or zone-based training, the Fitbit Ace LTE has interval-based gaming. Google enlisted the efforts of independent Australian gaming studios to develop short, engaging 3D active games for the new Fitbit Arcade platform that draws on the data from the watch’s accelerometer and other sensors and engages the haptic feedback and speakers.
In a demo, I watched a small child play a fishing game by casting a line and reeling an imaginary fish in. They also crossed their arms to steer a chicken racing in a bathtub through space (I still do not fully understand this game concept, so apologies). Each game is time-limited, so the child can only play for 5 to 10 minutes at a time, but they are encouraged to return to the game two to three times per day, and new games will be unveiled every few months.
There is also a character called the Eejie, which I can only describe as a cross between a Tamagotchi and an avatar in Animal Crossing. Your child can customize their Eejie to look however they want, and daily activity will keep it healthy and happy. Playing games earns the child arcade points, which they can use to buy new accessories in-game or build homes in Bit Valley, where the Eejies live.
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Parents can also buy new bands offline. Each band is collectible and unlocks exclusive merch or outfits for their Eejie and their home in Bit Valley, like tradable furniture or other collectibles. The Fitbit Ace LTE will also soon have Tap to Pay via the near-field communication sensor (NFC).
Safe and Sound
With all the games and features, it’s easy to forget that the Fitbit Ace LTE is, in many respects, a full-featured smartwatch with built-in 4G LTE. It’s compatible with phones running Android 11 and iPhones running iOS 15 or newer. To set it up, download the Fitbit Ace app on your phone and sign in with your Gmail account. You will be prompted to set up a Google account for your child that syncs to the device. This is not a Gmail account; your child will not get a Gmail address or password, although you can sync it with your Google Family Link service if you have one.
Next, you’re prompted to subscribe to the Ace Pass service; you can’t use the device without a subscription. This activates the watch’s eSIM. Then you’re done. With built-in LTE connectivity, your child can make calls, take messages, and share their location, and you can see them in Google Maps. They can also access Fitbit Arcade. In the Fitbit Ace app, you can set up their list of approved contacts, impose School Time limits so they can’t access the games during the school day, and check an activity dashboard to see if they're being too sedentary.
The most important factor when giving your child a device is safety. In the current market, most brands of smartwatches marketed specifically to kids are security disasters; we generally recommend repurposing relatively more secure adult watches for your children. Until now, Apple was the only company that made that process relatively easy. Still, Apple doesn’t yet have a child-specific Apple Watch.
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For parents, their child’s safety is paramount, so Google says it has taken extra precautions with the Fitbit Ace LTE. Rather than trying to protect the data, Google adopted a policy of data minimization. Unlike the Fitbits for adults, Google will not take health data to improve products or do research; it will simply delete it all. Location history will be deleted after 24 hours and health data is deleted after 30 days. There are no third-party apps and no ads allowed.
Does Your Kid Need a Device?
When I told my kids about the new watches they were going to get to test, my 9-year-old frowned and said, “Sounds … distracting.” (Yes, she is a gadget reviewer’s kid.) This device launches into an atmosphere of profound ambivalence about the effects of smart devices on our children. Children are getting phones at younger and younger ages. According to Common Sense Media, about half of the children in the US already own a smartphone by age 11; my children are already starting to rely on mine to log in to their school’s set of proprietary apps.
At the same time, acknowledging the grim effects of social media on adolescent mental health, the schools in our city of Portland, Oregon, have started to ban phones and smartwatches from schools entirely. Organizations like Wait Until 8th ask parents to sign pledges to not give their child a smartphone until the eighth grade. My husband and I are not planning on giving our children smartphones until they’re 14.
I have been pretty happy with Apple's Family Setup and the limited functionality on my children’s Apple Watches. The only problem is that my children are not motivated to keep them charged and wear them often and are often not wearing them when they need them.
The Fitbit Ace LTE could change that, motivating them to keep it charged and on their wrists, even if the idea of a 24/7 wearable gaming device makes me a little nervous. I also don't want to keep buying bands every six months; my bank account and I already have enough trouble managing their Animal Crossing and Squishmallow habits.
“All we need to do is build a great product and schools will respond accordingly,” says Anil Sabharwal, Google's vice president of product management for health and wearables. “We’re working with school boards to talk about what mechanisms we can install so that the watches can be used in schools. But even so, there’s a lot of time before school, when parents want to make sure their kids get to school safely. The kids have after-school activities. We see a tremendous amount of value there.”
The solutions are imperfect, but at least they're there. Giving my children smartwatches may sometimes be a distraction, but it also lets my kid move more freely around her neighborhood, get exercise, and socialize in person with her friends. If a device can help further those goals, I'm all for it. And maybe walking around more will help improve her sense of direction, just a little bit.
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