Google has not commanded a strong presence in the smartwatch space, where fellow tech giants have consolidated their domination for a long time. Well, this changes with the release of the Pixel Watch, the company’s first full-featured premium smartwatch. The announcement was made at the ‘Made by Google’ event held by the tech giant on Thursday, which was livestreamed for those who were unable to attend it physically. We reported on the Pixel smartphones in a separate article – to read it, go here.
We come back to the Pixel Watch. A round smartwatch, the Pixel Watch comes with WearOS 3.5 and is the brainchild of the partnership between Google and fitness electronics company Fitbit, meaning that it is the first Android watch with Fitbit integrations. It comes with all-day battery life and all-day heart rate tracking, as well as other fitness features such as Fall Detection (which comes next year), a new ECG app, and six months of Fitbit Premium. “Google Pixel Watch is designed to be worn every day, with hardware and software that look and feel great no matter what,” said Isabelle Olsson, the hardware design lead for Google.
Unlike the Pixel 7 and the Pixel 7 Pro, the Pixel Watch does not come with a customized chip. Instead, it comes with a standard Exynos 9110, as well as 2GB of RAM. It also comes with a feature that is likely to be extremely useful – Emergency SOS, which will alert emergency responders or trusted contacts in case of an emergency. Coupled with the ECG app, and this could be the key to saving lives and bringing medical attentions to individuals quickly if they have a heart attack in the middle of the night,for example.
The Pixel Watch also comes with a 1.2” display, which peaks at 1,000nits of brightness for outdoor visibility and has an Always-On mode, along with a Gorillia Glass 5 cover. It has two variants – one comes with support for WiFi while the other brings support for LTE – and if you buy the device, you get 3 months of YouTubeMusic Premium for free. The watch is quite customizable – it comes with many combinations of stylish bands and customizable watch faces. To change, you can simply twist and click to swap between the wide variety of available bands.
If this is not enough, the Pixel Watch, said to be the “best of Google with FitBit,” also displays notifications for Google Calendar and Gmail, comes with support for Google Pay, and boasts of features such as Active Zone Minutes and a Daily Readiness score. With the Pixel Watch, you can also get more than 1000 workouts for HIIT to yoga and over 400 pieces of mindfulness content. You can also control your smart home devices through the Google Home app, or just say “Hey, Google” to your watch if you would like to adjust the thermostat or turn off the lights.
Coming with sleep tracking as well, the watch comes in come in three stainless steel finishes – black, silver, and gold. The device will start at $349 for the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth model, while the LTE version will cost you $399. For now, pre-orders begin in a handful of countries – this list includes the United States, Canada, the UK, Ireland (Wi-Fi model only), France, Germany, Taiwan, Japan, and Australia. Accessory bands are priced between from $49-$199.
