It’s also 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 runs well overall and lives up to Google’s boast of a 24-hour battery life, though we did see a few small synchronization difficulties and questionable call quality during testing. Even yet, 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. also you will learn our article on Google Pixel Watch review.
Design
The Google Pixel Watch has a straightforward design; you could even describe it as minimalist. There is only one size available: 41mm. Although those with larger wrists might be disappointed by the lack of a larger selection, it was excellent for us. A 3D glass dome and a rounded design are present on the face. The fact that a significant portion of the display is unusable is not altered by this heightened effect, which detracts from the panel’s thick bezel. Maybe it’s because of our prior experiences with Samsung watches. We can’t help but feel that the absence of a digital rotating bezel in that area represents a squandered opportunity. The Pixel Watch is a “dark mode” device, which makes sense to me. To further hide the bezel, the interface and each of Google’s watch faces feature black backgrounds. Only the Google Photos watch face magnifies in the bezel, which we actually prefer from a personalization standpoint even though it draws attention to the watch’s little 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. There are 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 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 we are enthusiastic about altering the straps according to the occasion or the style.
Interface and controls
After years of experimenting with partner smartwatches, Google is now able to show off Wear OS on its own hardware. The Pixel Watch was simple to set up and connect to my Pixel 6 Pro, as with other Google products. Basically, setting up the watch is as simple as removing it from the packaging and turning it on. our Pixel immediately recognized it, and we were ready to go. The key to the bite-sized Android experience is swiping between app tiles, each of which offers a quick glance at information like the weather or your health data, such as your heart rate, with the opportunity to tap in to obtain a more in-depth breakdown of the relevant data. The design of each individual tile has grown to be a huge area of interest for us because, for the most part, we haven’t found ourselves going further into the apps. you can read our article on Google Pixel Watch review. What essential components does each app opt to have exhibited above the fold, so to speak? How is that reconciled with a straightforward user experience? For most tiles, like the elegant and straightforward Weather tile, Google-developed apps seem to err towards a “less is more” design. On the other side, the Agenda tile might use something other than just white text in the Centre of a black screen to make it more helpful. The Pixel Watch’s GPS tracking felt stable, and we didn’t notice any drift on the circular GTA minimap-style readout, which made using Google Maps for walking navigation simple. There is a static arrow icon on the home tile that 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. But 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
There is something to be said for actually being able to view a product in person as opposed to only seeing images and renderings of it. We were undoubtedly concerned that the Pixel Watch’s screen might disappoint before the announcement. Bezels are a necessary evil, but from the renders and images we’ve seen, we are not too sure how the Pixel Watch will appear when worn. Fortunately, this is one of those occasions when it’s crucial to actually see a product in action rather than relying on reviews or leak reports. We haven’t yet encountered a situation when we really wanted for a larger screen, despite the fact that the Watch may seem a little tiny on our wrists. It’s simple enough to read notifications, and you can change the font size or screen density by using the Google Pixel Watch companion app. Every time we raise our wrist, the display is actually pretty colorful and appealing to the eye. The menus and numerous panels that you’ll interface with are sharp, as are the text and various icons. Although we would have preferred a larger display and a 44mm or 45mm size for the Pixel Watch, keeping with a single screen size was definitely the best choice.
Google Pixel Watch review: Tracking
On Wear OS smartwatches, tracking your health or fitness has a really mixed history. The Google Fit app suite is a cumbersome affair that does a poor job of connecting the data from onboard sensors in an understandable fashion. Google has essentially left it up to its hardware partners to improve this specific aspect of Wear OS. A excellent illustration of that is Mobvoi introducing its own, much better-executed selection of apps to its TicWatches. It therefore comes as no surprise that Google chose Fitbit to supply such functionalities for the Pixel Watch. Daily step counts, sleep and heart rate monitoring, and activity tracking are all components of Fitbit’s software, which is used both inside and outside of the app. 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. You can search the Google Play Store to locate other apps if you don’t want to use Fitbit’s own. According to our expertise, there’s a good chance you might like to do that for some of these components. The Fitbit Exercise and Fitbit Today apps on the watch serve as the primary representations of the Fitbit integration on the device. You may log activities like swimming, jogging, cycling, hiking, and bootcamp sessions in the first section. Some of the 40+ supported modes merely provide basic heart rate and workout duration information. Although the Today app allows you to view your steps, it lacks the more detailed information that comes with the Fitbit smartwatches. To view that data, open the Fitbit companion app. To test the accuracy of the step tracking, we placed it up against a Garmin watch and an Oura Ring 3. Its step counts were generally accurate, frequently being only a few hundred steps off. A fundamental feature of Fitbit’s platform, sleep tracking is also present on the Pixel Watch. 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 Google Maps to move about, 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. Additionally, we used Google Assistant questions a lot. In our perspective, 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. For instance, with the last Galaxy Watch, Google Assistant capability was promised but didn’t materialize for several months. It’s high time Google released a smartwatch that works well with their wearable software. As a result, Wear OS’s well-known tile-based navigation is there on the Google Pixel Watch and functions as well as we’ve ever seen it. Although it differs from the menus on the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5, it shows that Samsung has given Wear OS its own unique interpretation. 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. This is a significant perk that this year’s Fitbit smartwatches have done away with, but that’s a complaint for another day. You can easily access the necessary settings on your phone from your watch, and if you misplace your phone, you may ping it. You can design a watch face that displays Google Photos photographs on your wrist using the watch app on your phone. Of course, we used a picture of our dog. Speaking of Google Photos, the app has a camera remote feature that enables you to operate the camera on a Pixel smartphone that is used in conjunction. We were happy to see this on the Pixel Watch as it is one of our favorite Apple Watch features.
Google Pixel Watch review: Battery life
The Pixel Watch’s smart features come at a price in terms of battery life. To determine how long it would survive, we tracked its charge level over a number of days while the watch was worn in a variety of positions. Despite an hour of GPS-tracked running, the Pixel Watch 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. However, this was when conducting only passive fitness tracking and using the GPS for an hour. The Pixel Watch works best when its always-on display option is activated. With no need to flip your wrist to wake the screen, you can now view the time. The battery died the next day at 9:30am after starting on a full charge at 11:11am one morning with this mode turned on. Again, this was done without any additional taxing use. Unless you carefully manage your charging cycle, you must pick between sleep tracking and the always-on display. Potentially even more bothersome than in an Apple Watch is the battery life. Even the charging speed, which is rated at 80 minutes for a full charge, is not very outstanding. It makes use of a cute small magnetic wireless charging pad, just like the Apple Watch.
Price and configurations options
The GPS + Bluetooth-only Pixel Watch costs $349 (£339/AU$549), while the LTE-compatible model costs $399 (£379/AU$649). The 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). (View the remaining distinctions between the Fitbit Sense 2 and Google Pixel Watch.) The Pixel Watch was released on October 13, 2022, and we have since kept 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. also you can check our article on Google Pixel Watch review.
Conclusion
The Google Pixel Watch is a stylish piece of clothing technology. It is attractive and, more importantly, practical. It’s an excellent complement to Google’s new Pixel 7 line of smartphones. However, 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, however, 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 Google’s 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.
