Pixel Watch review: beautiful, fast and too expensive

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the Apple Watch. It’s a halo device for the entire Apple ecosystem, with roughly a 30 percent connection rate for new US iPhone sales. There is nothing better than the Apple Watch for Android phones, which makes it the reason to switch the ecosystem from Android to iOS. If you’re already using iOS, this is one of the main reasons to stay. The Apple Watch is Apple’s most powerful locking weapon, and Google has done absolutely nothing to combat it over the past few years.

Google may have first entered this market with Android Wear in 2014, but its hardware progress ground to a halt in 2015 and hasn’t changed much since then. This was partly due to the company’s reliance on Qualcomm’s SoCs, which came out with the same basic chip design (under different model numbers) for six consecutive years. Plus, Wear OS didn’t require much development effort, with major releases only happening in 2014, 2017, and 2018. In 2018, Google quietly stopped developing apps for Wear OS.

It’s a common situation: an Apple product has a focused, vertically integrated, straight-line development path, while a comparable Google product has to deal with an ever-changing group of semi-interested hardware partners, Google’s internal attention deficit disorder, and at least one major rebrand. The Apple Watch left the market while Google’s efforts failed and the company captured about 3 percent of the wearables market within a few years.

Google’s first private label smartwatch represents the preliminary fruits of a major multi-year reboot of Google’s smartwatch ambitions. Google outwardly began showing interest in Wear OS again in 2019 when it spent $40 million on some technology from the Fossil Group, saying it would help improve Google’s smartwatch platform. Google’s wearables were resurrected last year thanks to a purchase by Fitbit, which was (casually) integrated into the development of the Pixel Watch.

The real factor, however, is the company’s partnership with Samsung, which was announced in 2021. Samsung has ditched its Tizen smartwatch operating system in favor of Wear OS. Samsung got about a year of exclusive rights to update Wear OS (version 3.0), and Google got access to Samsung’s SoC for the Pixel Watch. While Qualcomm’s SoCs have held back a viable Wear OS competitor for years, Samsung is introducing a steady stream of regular and competent SoC updates.

Google is back with the Pixel Watch and hopefully the company can focus on releasing yearly sequels. The Wear OS team seems to be backing the idea: Wear OS Product Management Director Bjorn Kilburn recently committed to releasing annual Wear OS updates and quarterly feature updates, just like we see on the phone side of Android. That sounds like a major change from the four major updates that Android/Wear OS has gone through in its eight-year life. If the hardware development team can deliver the same commitment, it looks like we’ve got a viable product line waiting for us.

Google isn’t exactly fixated on what looks like a first-generation wearable update, but the groundwork for a stable and promising move into the future has already been laid. Google has managed to get back to being relevant in the wearables market.