The Google Wear OS smartwatch is visually appealing with a domed front that resembles a pool of water on your wrist. It includes all the preinstalled lifestyle and fitness functions you would expect from a high-end wristwatch, including calling/texting, mobile payments, and smart home controls, by combining Google’s Wear OS with a significant amount of Fitbit. Additionally, you may personalize it with a variety of third-party apps if you have access to the Play Store.
The Pixel Watch is a great smartwatch that lives up to Google’s boast of a 24-hour battery life. However, we did see a few small synchronization difficulties and questionable call quality during testing. Even still, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 retains our Editors’ Choice title for Android-compatible smartwatches since it costs $70 less and has comparable features and performance in a more robust design.
Design
The Google Pixel Watch is a minimalist watch with a 3D glass dome and a rounded design. It has a single size available, 41mm, and although those with larger wrists might be disappointed by the lack of a larger selection, it was excellent for us. The display is not affected by the heightened effect which detracts from its thick bezel.
The Pixel Watch is missing a digital rotating bezel, which we feel represents a missed opportunity. The watch is also “dark mode” which makes sense to us. The interface and each of Google’s watch faces feature black backgrounds, with the Google Photos watch face magnifying in the bezel. We actually prefer this from a personalization standpoint even though it draws attention to the watch’s small size. ..
The Pixel Watch display has received some concerns of OLED burn-in, but Google claims that what customers are actually seeing is image retention and that it frequently shifts pixels to prevent burn-in. The side-mounted digital crown has tactile grooves and a similar appearance to the digital crown on the Apple Watch. The Pixel Watch contains a small button above the digital crown that, when quickly pressed, launches the most recently used apps. This feature was added to the Apple Watch’s side button only this year. That button may be long-pressed to activate Google Assistant.
Google has three color options for the Pixel Watch: matte black, silver, and gold. In addition to the Pixel Watch, Google also introduced seven different styles of replaceable bands that are all only compatible with the Pixel Watch. As a proprietary technology, switching the bands requires some skill. Sincerely, we have suffered a lot at first and were briefly convinced that we couldn’t put the band back together. However, we eventually managed to get the hang of it and are enthusiastic about altering the straps according to the occasion or style.
Interface and controls
Google’s new Wear OS smartwatch is simple to set up and connect to your Pixel 6 Pro. Simply remove it from the packaging and turn it on. Our Pixel immediately recognized it, and we were ready to go. ..
Swiping between app tiles on an Android phone offers a quick glance at information like the weather or your health data, such as your heart rate. Tapping in to obtain a more in-depth breakdown of the relevant data is possible. ..
Google’s apps tend to err towards a “less is more” design, while other apps use different methods to stand out. The GPS tracking on the Pixel Watch was stable, and the GTA minimap-style readout on the Pixel Watch made using Google Maps for walking navigation simple. ..
The static arrow icon on the home tile indicates when you’re using navigation, and it feels like a missed opportunity to not have that arrow constantly pointing toward your destination to make it easier to glance down and reorient yourself without having to clumsily look at the phone’s UI. The Pixel Watch Maps app also lacks some key features of its phone-based counterpart, such as transit directions, and could use some smarter integration into the phone’s UI. ..
Despite how adorable it may be to be able to remotely capture a shot with our phone’s camera, the Pixel Watch wasn’t exactly the Google wrist-topia we’d hoped for. Google promotes the advantages of pairing several devices to enable maximum capability, however if our Pixel Bud is only connected to the Pixel Watch and not to our Pixel 6 Pro, we are unable to activate our Google Assistant by holding it in. What in the hell? Furthermore, the lack of Google Meet capability on our watch is annoying because we frequently use video conversations using that app.
Google Pixel Watch review: Display
We were undoubtedly concerned that the Pixel Watch’s screen might disappoint before the announcement. However, from the renders and images we’ve seen, we are not too sure how the Pixel Watch will appear when worn. ..
We’ve had some issues with the size of the Google Pixel Watch on our wrists, but it’s simple enough to read notifications and change font size or density using the Google Pixel Watch companion app.
The Pixel Watch is a stylish and colorful watch that is easy to use. The menus and panels are sharp, and the text and icons are well-done. We would have preferred a larger display, but keeping with a single screen size was the best choice.
Google Pixel Watch review: Tracking
Wear OS smartwatches have a mixed history in terms of tracking your health or fitness. Google Fit is a cumbersome affair that does a poor job of connecting the data from onboard sensors in an understandable fashion. Mobvoi has introduced its own, much better-executed selection of apps to its TicWatches, which makes it easier to track your health and fitness.
Google has chosen Fitbit to supply the functionalities for the Pixel Watch. Daily step counts, sleep and heart rate monitoring, and activity tracking are all components of Fitbit’s software. The data from the onboard ECG and blood oxygen sensors is likewise handled by Fitbit. The Fitbit ECG app must be downloaded from the Play Store in order to take measures by placing your finger on the watch crown in order to detect signs of atrial fibrillation. Blood oxygen data is gathered at night, much like with Fitbit’s watches. ..
If you don’t want to use the Fitbit app, you can search for other apps on the Google Play Store that work with the watch. Our expertise tells us that there are likely some apps that you’ll like better. The main Fitbit app on the watch is for logging activities like swimming, jogging, cycling, hiking, and bootcamp sessions. Some of the 40+ supported modes merely provide basic heart rate and workout duration information. ..
The Today app does not offer the detailed information that comes with the Fitbit smartwatches, which is why you need to open the Fitbit companion app to view that data. The Pixel Watch also includes sleep tracking, which is present on the device but not as detailed as on the Fitbit devices. Data such as sleep length, sleep phases, and time asleep matched the sleep tracking on the Oura we wore alongside it and mostly matched the high-quality sleep tracking data recorded on Fitbit’s devices in the past.
Other features
The Pixel Watch uses Wear OS, which integrates Google’s suite of services, to offer virtually every app a person would use on a regular basis. Google Maps, Google Calendar, Google Pay, Google Home, YouTube Music, and Google Assistant are all included in this. We used the Google Maps app to move about, the Google Calendar (named Agenda in the applications menu) sent me warnings for 10-minute meetings, and we used the Google Home app on our wrists to turn on our Philips Hue lighting.
We used Google Assistant a lot on our Pixel Watch. Having Google Assistant here is a huge plus; yeah, it’s expected, but it’s still nice and excellently equivalent to Siri on the Apple Watch for things like timers and weather inquiries. The Pixel Watch also allows you to place phone calls. Wear OS is a separate operating system that runs on some of the top smartwatches for Android. According to our past experiences, these smartwatches only offer a select number of Google services; they never offer the whole range, and there is never a clear pattern as to which services are supported and which are not.
Google has been promising that their new Pixel Watch will have Google Assistant capabilities for months now, but it seems like they may not have delivered on that promise. This is because the Pixel Watch does not work with Samsung’s Galaxy Wear OS, which is the most popular Wear OS platform. However, similar to the Galaxy Watch, the Google Play Store offers support for a few third-party apps like Spotify and Strava on the Pixel Watch.
The Pixel Watch has a camera remote feature that enables you to operate the camera on a Pixel smartphone that is used in conjunction with it. ..
Google Pixel Watch review: Battery life
The Pixel Watch’s smart features come at a price in terms of battery life. We tracked its charge level over a number of days while the watch was worn in a variety of positions, and found that it lost 8% battery life after starting out with a full charge. That’s actually not awful at all and supports Google’s 12-hour claim. The watch had 21% battery left exactly 24 hours after a full charge. ..
The Pixel Watch’s battery life is not as good when it’s in the always-on display mode.
The Apple Watch Series 3 has a lot of great features, but it also has some drawbacks. One of the biggest drawbacks is its battery life. Even with the fast charging rate, it takes about two hours to fully charge the watch. This means that you will have to be careful not to overcharge it or you will have to take it off of your wrist for a long time.
Price and configurations options
The Google Pixel Watch is now somewhat more expensive than the Apple Watch Series 8 ($399) but less expensive than the Galaxy Watch 5 ($279) and the recently introduced Fitbit Sense 2 ($299).
On October 13, 2022, the Google Pixel Watch was released. Since then, we’ve been keeping tabs on the best prices. The Google Pixel 7 and Google Pixel 7 Pro, which both make excellent companion devices for the company’s smartwatch, debuted at the same time as the Pixel Watch. You can also check out our article on Google Pixel Watch review. ..
Conclusion
The Google Pixel Watch is a stylish piece of wearable technology that is attractive and practical. It’s an excellent complement to Google’s new Pixel 7 line of smartphones. However, we found that when we utilized the watch to track working out, walking, heart rate, sleep habits, and more, the minor hurdles we had to jump through (which don’t count towards our daily step tally) quickly vanished into the background. ..
The Google Assistant on your wrist is one of the best things you can have. Although we adore Siri and the Apple Watch, Google Assistant is still more intelligent because of its extensive knowledge base. The screen is a little bit on the small side, but like we mentioned above, unless you’re reading text, you don’t notice it too much.
