The Google Pixel Watch 2 is a smartwatch with upgraded performance, all-day battery life, and new safety features. It comes in Polished Silver, Matte Black, and Champagne Gold Aluminium cases.
Here are some features of the Pixel Watch 2:
- Three new sensors for deeper health insights
- Improved AI heart rate algorithm
- All-new heart rate sensor with 25 times more LEDs than the Pixel Watch
- Upgraded hardware with a Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 chipset
- Better fitness tracking sensors
- Wear OS 4
The Pixel Watch 2 has a diameter of 41 mm, a height of 12.3 mm, and weighs 31 g without the band. It comes with a USB-C fast charging cable. In India, the Pixel Watch 2 costs ₹ 39,900 for the LTE variant.
That’s a fairly typical review day for me, but as with any gadget, your mileage will vary. If you optimize battery settings, you could probably push past the 24-hour mark — especially if it’s a day where you’re lounging around at home or glued to your desk at work. If you are using a lot of GPS tracking, it depends on how much you use the watch during said activity.
The most battery-intensive workout I did was a 35-minute GPS walk while streaming an offline YouTube Music playlist and using Safety Check. I was checking my wrist every few minutes, and even so, I only blasted through 15 percent. But for the most part, my runs and walks this week averaged around 25 to 45 minutes, and I typically burned around 6 to 10 percent battery.
One thing: Bedtime mode makes a huge difference. If you turn that on, overnight sleep tracking only drains about 10 to 15 percent battery. The mildly annoying thing is that automating Bedtime mode appears to be tied to Digital Wellbeing, and it’s not intuitive to set up. First, you’ve got to set up a bedtime schedule in your phone’s settings app. While Android phones are required to support Digital Wellbeing in some way, you also have to toggle a switch in the Google Pixel Watch app to sync your phone’s Digital Wellbeing modes with the watch. Also, if you don’t want to use Google’s Digital Wellbeing, you’ll have to turn on Bedtime mode manually via the watch’s quick settings menu.
The only sacrifice, if you can call it that, that the Pixel Watch 2 made for better battery life is that the charger has adopted pogo pins — which some folks were none too pleased about. I wrote about that more in-depth here, but personally, this is a tradeoff I’m happy to make. In my testing, faster charging plus a regular routine means I’ve only lost maybe 45 minutes a day to get up to 95 or 100 percent.
Some folks will see 24-hour battery life as a continued failure. After all, Garmins and Fitbit trackers can last for days, even weeks, without charging. But as far as flagship smartwatches go, Google’s one job was to make a watch that could last an entire day without caveats. And it’s done that.
Last year, the Google-Fitbit integration and product lineup was a mess. There was the Google Pixel Watch, Fitbit Versa 4, and Fitbit Sense 2 — three smartwatches that were so similar Google had to make up arbitrary reasons to set them apart. The Pixel Watch was missing key Fitbit features. The Fitbits had previously available smart features taken away. None of it made sense.
That’s not as much of a problem this year with the Pixel Watch 2 and the Fitbit Charge 6. You look at these two devices, and you know what to expect out of each.
For a watch that looks nearly identical to its predecessor, the Pixel Watch 2 is notably better in every way that really matters. Last year, I had a long list of things Google and Fitbit needed to work on. (Battery life was written in all caps, underlined several times.) This year, that list is much smaller. What the next Pixel Watch needs to deliver is repairability, durability, and a larger size option. Everything else — including wonky GPS — I expect is due to pre-release software or will improve via updates, just as it did last year.
After this week, I’m increasingly convinced that Google has the wherewithal to make the best Android smartwatch in the not-too-distant future. It just needs to — excuse my French — keep its shit together. That means clearly communicating what’s happening with this ongoing Fitbit integration, which, to my eye, is the most obvious potential stumbling block outside of its fragile screens. Change is never easy, but legacy Fitbit users have been through enough this year, and Google can’t afford to backslide here.
With the Pixel Watch 2, Google is almost there. More so than with its Pixel phones, Android smartwatches are where Google has a shot of being really good at something. And unlike Samsung, it has momentum on its side. My one concern is that should Google succeed here, it’ll start entering the Pixel Watch into the ecosystem wars. I didn’t see overt signs of that while testing, but there’s a forthcoming feature where you’ll be able to screen calls from the Pixel Watch 2 — if it’s paired to a Pixel phone. Maybe it’s nothing, but success is the slipperiest slope into a walled garden.
