Review: Google Pixel Watch 3 - Watch with High Expectations

Besides being the world's largest search engine, ad seller, and operating system producer, Google also makes gadgets, but they can hardly account for a major part of the company's revenue. The purpose of Google's Pixel series is rather to showcase itself. Partly to show what user experience their operating system can provide, partly as a demonstration platform for technology where Google is at the forefront, such as artificial intelligence.

This sets my expectations for the Google Pixel Watch 3. Watches with Google's Wear OS already exist, primarily from Samsung, but also Xiaomi, Oneplus, among others, but from Google's watch, I expect something extra, otherwise, it wouldn't need to exist. The fact that it is also a fairly expensive watch, in its cheapest version it is a thousand kronor more expensive than Samsung's equivalent Galaxy Watch 7, reinforces this feeling.

In terms of appearance, Google doesn't need to be ashamed of the Pixel Watch 3. The watch has a sleek, curvy design where the front glass is elegantly rounded and extends around the sides where it meets the shiny aluminum back. However, this makes it quite a thick watch, whether you choose it in size 41 or 45 mm. The curvature also excludes sapphire glass, and the screen is made of Gorilla Glass 5. In addition to the touchscreen, the watch is controlled by a rotatable push button and a slightly more discreet button, which is quite hard to press. The bands are made of fairly conventional plastic and have a fastening that is not at all standardized, so if you want a different band, it must be one specially made for the Pixel Watch.

The screen is really good, with a brightness that can vary from 1 to 2000 nits. This means that the screen can be read in direct sunlight, but when you wear the watch at night in a dark room, it doesn't light up to the point of being disturbing.

Above all: Slow

You can use the watch with or without the always-on display, which we'll return to shortly, but regardless, I soon notice that the screen takes a second to fully wake up. Swiping in the user interface is mostly quick, but as soon as I click on something for more information, it takes a couple of seconds while the watch has to start an app. The watch simply feels slow. This is a problem because the watch competes with the phone in your pocket. Anything that takes a few seconds before you can do it can probably be done better if you instead take out your phone and turn it on.

The fact that the watch is slow is not mainly Google's fault. It is powered by the Qualcomm SW5100 chipset, which is exactly the same chip as in last year's Pixel Watch 2. Since Qualcomm hasn't made a new and faster watch chipset, it's what you have to stick with, unlike Samsung, which makes its own significantly faster watch chip for the Galaxy Watch 7. On the other hand, I don't find the Oneplus Watch 2R slow, even though it uses Wear OS and is just as dependent on Qualcomm's chips, so somewhere Google still has a responsibility for not optimizing the experience based on the performance available.

A situation where I really get annoyed by the watch's sluggishness is when I need to unlock it with the lock pattern I've chosen. The watch's response is so poor that it's hard to see if I've made the correct swipe gesture, and it takes a second before I know. I only need to unlock the watch once after putting it on, then it remains unlocked, but unfortunately, this means several times a day in practice.

Charging all the time

The watch is preset to use an always-on display, and with it turned on, I struggle to get the battery life to last a whole waking day, and this is also a watch I'm expected to wear at night to benefit from Fitbit's health metrics. I try turning off the Always on-screen but still find it hard to get the watch to last much more than a day, and definitely not over two nights. The 41 mm model I'm testing takes an hour to fully charge, and if I'm not charging it while I sleep, I find it hard to routinely find times when I can charge it for an hour without completely forgetting about it, so in practice, I end up charging it morning and evening.

Google highlights that the Pixel Watch 3 has an improved power-saving mode that is supposed to provide up to 36 hours of battery life while continuing to measure your health data. It is unclear what the power-saving mode does, the watch does not become noticeably slower because of it, and I can access all functions. According to Google, it reduces background activity, and notifications may be delayed if the power-saving mode is on. When I test the power-saving mode, I can conclude that the longer battery life seems to assume that you do not actively use the watch during that time, because when I try to log a walk and listen to some music at the same time, the battery decreases by 20 percent in an hour despite the power-saving mode.

The point of a screen that is always on is that the watch should always show the time and other basic information. On a watch, one could almost argue that if you need an always-on display, the watch has not done its job, either it has not detected that you lifted your arm to look at it, or the response is so slow that you want to see something before the screen wakes up. Or as is the case with the Pixel Watch 3, both. For this to be meaningful, the information displayed here must of course be current. It is for the most part but not always. Sometimes the Pixel Watch 3 seems to forget to update the always-on screen, and the information displayed, such as the heart rate during exercise, can be more than a minute old. Once, I watch in horror as the screen switches from always-on to awake, and the watch adjusts itself from 19:48 to 20:04! That is not okay.

Good Health Measurement

I'm not going to promise that I'm done talking about how the watch's poor response causes problems, but let's take a look at what it actually does for a moment. By now, we expect certain functions from a smartwatch, and we get them. You want it to measure steps and pulse and other health indicators, maybe also alert if it can detect a serious health condition. You want to be able to receive notifications from the phone to the watch and be able to reply to messages. You might want to listen to music without having the phone with you, use the watch as a remote control for the phone camera, and make payments with the watch. We get all of this, and in addition, we can add the ability to install third-party apps and use the watch for offline navigation without having the phone with you, with pre-downloaded maps.

But that doesn't necessarily mean we get it in an enjoyable form. The notifications come in a readable format and are well-organized, but if I want to reply to a message, there are no preset response options like on most other watches or for that matter Google's own step counters from Fitbit. You can reply with emojis, type on the tiny keyboard, or speak text, but none of them are done particularly elegantly, and here the Pixel Watch 3 fares poorly even compared to other watches with Wear OS.

For health data, it relies on Fitbit's mostly excellent system. For the Pixel Watch 3, several health metrics have been updated and expanded, and here you can finally feel a bit of ambition from Google to showcase what they can do.

For example, the watch gives a morning report a while after it notices I've woken up, where it assesses my condition based on how I slept, my resting heart rate and rhythm while I slept, if my body temperature was unusual, it gives me a recommendation for physical activity level for the day, and ends with a weather forecast. You can specify if you want to improve or maintain your fitness, and the Fitbit app gives you tailored recommendations for physical activity level, and if you're running, the watch can become a customized running coach. The health metrics are comprehensive and detailed, sometimes innovative but still mostly educational.

A lot of digging

However, Fitbits app doesn't necessarily integrate well with Wear OS. Sure, I can see quite a bit on the watch face, and even more on cards that I can swipe between, but I often find myself in the Fitbit app on the watch where I have to click around to find the information I'm looking for, and where the watch's sluggishness becomes very apparent again. Here I can compare with Fitbit's step counter, and the feeling is that I am much closer to the numbers I am looking for there.

Sometimes Fitbit can measure things that they don't really know what to do with. For example, the watch measures stress in the form of "electro dermal responses", EDA. The watch detects a stress reaction in the form of sweat secretions in the skin. Every time this happens, the watch gives me a notification telling me that it has detected a stress response and asks me to consider my situation. I think these responses match quite poorly when I actually feel stressed, but above all, exactly how does it make me less stressed if the watch simultaneously pings and says I'm stressed? After a while, I manage to turn off these notifications. A message I do appreciate, however, is the reminder to move every hour, but unlike the stress notifications, it gets lost in the system and is easy to miss if you don't look at the watch at the right moment.

Besides Fitbit, we get some additional integration with Google's services. You can use the watch as a remote control for Google TV, and you can control your Nest doorbell and other smart home functions if you have them. If you have a Pixel phone, you can unlock the phone with the watch and UWB, but since the watch vibrates and sends a notification every time, it becomes quite annoying when I try it. You can take voice messages that you can sync to your phone afterward if it's not with you. Of course, you can also voice control the watch with "Hey Google," but then you have to speak slowly. When I try to say "Hey Google, what time is it?" it only picks up the word time, did I mention that Pixel Watch 3 is a bit slow?

The minimalist lifestyle guru Marie Kondo once advocated that you should look at every item you have and ask if it gives you joy. "Does it spark joy?" If not, you should get rid of it. This is probably particularly relevant for smartwatches, as they are fundamentally quite unnecessary gadgets. Sure, the health tracking is good, but you can get that from a fitness band for a fifth of the price or less. The smartwatch must justify its existence by being a gadget that makes you happy. Pixel Watch 3 gives me quite little joy but unexpectedly much irritation. It was not what I expected from Google.