The Pixel Watch just keeps getting better.
While the original model more or less set out the blueprint for what Google wanted to do with its own smartwatch, each subsequent Pixel Watch has brought major advancements. The Pixel Watch 2 offered much better performance and battery life, while the Pixel Watch 3 refined the design with bigger screens and smaller bezels.
And now the Pixel Watch 4 might be the most substantial upgrade yet. It is by some distance the best Android smartwatch I’ve ever used.
It might not seem as if Google has changed too much with this year’s model if you’re looking at press renders, but the Pixel Watch 4 looks quite a bit different to its predecessors in person.
I’ve been wearing the 45mm model, which this year is presented as simply another size option, unlike the “Pixel Watch 3 XL”. While it’s still 12.3mm at its thickest point, it looks and feels slimmer on your wrist because of a streamlined, tapered design. My model comes in “moonstone”, the blue-grey finish that’s new to the Pixel 10 Pro phones; I like the colour, but you don’t see all that much of it when wearing the watch.
The Pixel Watch has always leant into a circular, curvy design, but the 4 takes it to a new level by adopting domed glass and bending the OLED panel below it. Google has further slimmed down the bezels by 16%, giving you 10% more screen real estate. The visible area of the screen now extends into the curved edges, meaning you can see the extremities of circular watch faces when looking dead on from the side. It’s not quite at oil-filled Ressence watch levels, but we’re getting there.
The domed effect is actually a little odd at first when looking at text-based content. The convex nature of the screen recalls the slight distortion of reading MS-DOS on a CRT monitor. But you get used to it, and I think it’s totally worth the tradeoff of making for a cooler-looking watch. It’s a really striking effect.
Like this year’s Pixel phones, the screen has received a peak brightness boost to 3,000 nits. It’s easy enough to view outside, though less obvious on a watch since Wear OS is heavy on the black backgrounds.
The Pixel Watch 4 is the first watch to make use of Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Wear W5 Gen 2 processor, the followup to the Gen 1 chip from 2022 that featured in the last two models. It doesn’t change the process node or the four ARM Cortex-A53 cores, but it adds more connectivity options like satellite messaging and comes in a smaller package for supposed better efficiency.
Google now claims 40 hours battery life for the 45mm Watch 4, which I think is a reasonable estimate. After putting mine on at noon, I had 60% of a charge remaining 24 hours later. The watch automatically switched to its battery-saving mode — which turns off the always-on display and limits background actions — at 15% charge after 40 hours, meaning I could make it to a solid 48 hours without much trouble. This isn’t too much different than what I saw from the Watch 3, but it does seem like you get a few hours more headroom.
The real battery-related improvement comes from the charger. The Pixel Watch 2 and 3 regressed from the original Watch’s magnetic puck, switching to an awkward pogo pin solution that required precise alignment. But the Watch 4’s charging cable is more of a weighted dock than a puck, sitting conveniently on a desk waiting for you to place the watch sideways.
It’s just a huge improvement, at least for my charging patterns, which tend to involve taking the watch off when I shower in the morning and wearing it the rest of the time, including to bed. You don’t have to deal with a stray cable on your desk or nightstand when you’re not using it, because the dock just sits in place with the lead neatly behind it. The watch stays upright, displaying the time and charging status in the correct orientation if you nudge it.
The dock is also 25% faster than before, charging the 45mm Watch 4 from 0 to 100% in about an hour. If you’re like me and charge it for around 30 minutes every day when you’re not wearing the watch, you’ll never need to think about the battery.
The charging contacts do protrude slightly from the left side of the watch, but they read as part of the speaker module and the magnets are strong enough that you’re never going to misalign it on the charger. This is a home-run improvement for the Pixel Watch and something I’ve long emulated on my Apple Watch Ultra with a goofy-but-cute iMac G3-style charger adapter. It’s great that this is included in the box — I just hope Google actually sticks with it.
At the end of last year’s Pixel Watch 3 review, I said I’d be happy with some new watch faces in lieu of hardware advancements. Not a take that aged well, because the Watch 4’s hardware is meaningfully better, which also makes me happy.
But Google did add some new watch faces, too, and thankfully some of them meet the criteria I was hoping for: minimalist analogue design with customisable information density. “Corsa” and “Expedition” are both good additions here that look great with the new domed glass.
Material 3 Expressive is not as dramatic an overhaul of Wear OS as it is of Android on the Pixel phones, but it still works well and comes with some clever tweaks that suit the circular display. The “clear all” button at the bottom of your notifications, for example, dynamically grows and shrinks in time with your scrolling rather than simply getting cut off, and colours throughout the OS reflect your watch face theming.
At this point, Google’s own software on the Watch 4 is generally very good. Native apps like Gmail, Maps and Weather are well-designed for the watch screen and more useful than their Apple Watch counterparts. I also much prefer Google’s approach to sleep tracking, which basically just works automatically without requiring you to set a confusing “focus” schedule — and also seems more accurate, in my experience. Gemini, meanwhile, is obviously leagues ahead of Siri, and a fantastic addition to the Pixel Watch.
There is, however, still an undeniable app gap when compared to the Apple Watch. It’s not that I necessarily want to run full-scale apps on my wrist, but being able to customise watch faces with complications for everyday things like my podcast app or e-bike does make a difference. That’s the main thing that makes me feel like the Apple Watch is the more capable device.
But Google is doing enough in its own right to make the comparison less clear than it once was. The Pixel Watch has evolved into a really mature product that in some ways I now think is the best smartwatch on the market.
The basic idea of the Pixel Watch was there with the first model, but it wasn’t a competitive product. Each subsequent iteration, however, has brought major improvements to the hardware, software, design — or all three, in the case of the Pixel Watch 4.
Honestly, I have very few notes this year. Let’s see what Google comes up with for the Pixel Watch 5, because short of a full-scale redesign, this one might be hard to beat.