Design
The Google Pixel Watch has a beautiful, spherical design — Google says, it’s inspired by a water droplet. The top is covered by a continuous, curved slab of Gorilla Glass 5, which seamlessly fuses with a scainless steel body.There’s a rotating crown on the side of the case, allowing for easier navigation of the Wear OS UI without having to constantly touch the screen. The Pixel Watch comes in three main colors — black, gold, and silver —, and a plethora of watchbands available right now from Google.
The mechanism to attach different bands is quite cool and quirky — it’s a rotating action, and the band locks deep into the Watch’s case, for a very secure fit. It also means it will be tougher to find 3rd party bands at first, but they may become more prevalent, depending on how popular the Pixel Watch gets to be.
There is only one size available — 41 mm casing. The clean, unintrusive look of the Pixel Watch makes it quite unisex, so that may be fine. We’ll see how it actually looks when we get our hands on it.
Software and features
The Pixel Watch comes with Wear OS — the latest platform, developed in partnership between Google and Samsung. It’s chock-full of features like heart rate tracking, detailed sleep tracking, ECG, and crash detection. Fall detection will also be coming to the Pixel Watch some time in 2023.
The Pixel Watch will work with any Android phone that runs on Android 8.0 or later. Obviously, it will pair seamlessly with the Pixel phones, but we don’t know if it will keep some exclusive features for Pixel phones alone.
The Pixel Watch will integrate with Fitbit Premium to deliver rich data, such as the “Daily readiness reading” — a stat that lets you know whether you should push yourself on today’s workout, or take the time to rest.
Of course, we have deep integration with Google’s services, too — Wallet for payments, Maps for turn-by-turn navigation on your wrist, Gmail and Calendar, as well as YouTube Music and Google Play.
Price and release
The Pixel Watch will begin shipping next week!