Pixel Watch review: Beautiful, fast, and way too expensive

It’s hard to overstate how important the Apple Watch has become. It’s the halo device for the entire Apple ecosystem, with something like a 30 percent attach rate on new US iPhone sales. There’s nothing like the Apple Watch for Android phones, making it the reason to switch ecosystems from Android to iOS. If you’re already on iOS, it’s one of the primary reasons to stay. The Apple Watch is Apple’s biggest lock-in weapon, and Google has spent the last few years doing absolutely nothing to fight it.

Google may have gotten to this market first with Android Wear in 2014, but its hardware progress came to a screeching halt in 2015 and hasn’t moved much since. This was partly due to the company’s reliance on Qualcomm SoCs, which have been released with the same basic chip design (under different model numbers) for six straight years. In addition, Wear OS hasn’t had the greatest development effort, with major releases only occurring in 2014, 2017, and 2018. 2018 was also around the time that Google quietly quit Wear OS app development.

It’s the usual situation: An Apple product has a focused, vertically integrated, laser-straight line of development, while the comparable Google product has to deal with a constantly shifting group of half-interested hardware partners, Google’s internal attention deficit disorder, and at least one major rebrand. The Apple Watch ran away with the market while Google’s efforts floundered, with the company capturing around 3 percent of the wearable market for several years.

Google’s first self-branded smartwatch represents the preliminary fruits of a major, multi-year reboot of Google’s smartwatch ambitions. Google outwardly started showing interest in Wear OS again in 2019 when it spent $40 million on some kind of technology from Fossil Group, saying it would help improve Google’s smartwatch platform. Google wearables powered up again last year with the company’s purchase of Fitbit, which has been (sloppily) integrated into Pixel Watch development.

The real enabler, though, is the company’s partnership with Samsung, announced in 2021. Samsung dumped its own Tizen smartwatch OS for Wear OS. Samsung got around a year of exclusivity for a revamp of Wear OS (version 3.0), and Google got access to Samsung’s SoCs for the Pixel Watch. While Qualcomm’s SoCs have been holding back a viable Wear OS competitor for years, Samsung represents a steady stream of regular, competent SoC updates.

With the Pixel Watch, Google is back, and hopefully the company can keep focused enough to release yearly sequels. The Wear OS team seems to be on board with that idea, with Wear OS Director of Product Management Björn Kilburn recently committing to yearly Wear OS updates and quarterly feature updates, just like we see on the phone side of Android. That sounds like a major change over the four-ish major updates Android/Wear OS has gotten over its eight-year life. If the hardware team can provide a similar commitment, it sounds like we’re in for a viable product line.

Google didn’t quite stick the landing on what feels like a first-generation wearable revamp, but the foundation is here for a stable, promising march toward the future. Google has clawed its way back to relevance in the wearables market.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1887656