New fitness-focused features turn the Google Pixel Watch 3 into a Garmin rival – oh, and it comes with “Pulse loss detection” as well
Smartwatches have been around long enough that you’d expect iterative upgrades to be just that: small improvements made each year instead of big leaps forward. That’s precisely the approach Google has taken with its new flagship smartwatch – the Google Pixel Watch 3– building on all the things that persuaded us to award its predecessor a much-improved score of 4/5 with a Recommended award, after a distinctly lukewarm first outing.
The Google Pixel Watch 3 keeps the same good looks it has had since its inauguration, but adds a new larger size and some subtle hardware improvements, and it shifts the balance away from pure smartwatch, towards more serious fitness- and health-focused features.
Google Pixel Watch 3 preview: Specifications, price and release date
- 41mm or 45mm sizes, with LTPO AMOLED displays, 1-60Hz refresh rate, 2,000 nit brightness and always-on display
- Gorilla Glass 5
- 5ATM water resistant, IP68 rated
- Qualcomm SW5100 SoC and Cortex M33 coprocessor
- 2GB RAM
- 32GB eMMC storage
- Android Wear OS 5.0 with 6mths Fitbit Premium
- Colours: champagne gold with a hazel band or polished silver aluminium with a rose quartz band (41mm); matte black with an obsidian band or polished hazel with a hazel band (45mm)
- Dimensions: 41 x 41 x 12.3mm (41mm); 45 x 45 x 12.3mm (45mm)
- Weight: 31g (41mm); 37g (45mm) – without wristband
- Battery: 307mAh (41mm); 420mAh (45mm)
- Price: £349 (41mm); £399 (45mm)
- Availability: Pre-order from Google, from 13 August 2024
Google Pixel Watch 3 preview: New features and first impressions
Google’s tagline for the Pixel Watch 3 is “designed for performance” and it’s the perfect description. For starters, this is the first time the watch has been available in more than one standard size; the standard 41mm is joined by a new 45mm size for those who prefer a beefier look, a larger screen and the superior battery life that usually accompanies larger wearables.
Google has also made some subtler, less obvious changes. The OLED “Actua” displays are double the brightness, at up to 2,000 nits peak and they occupy more of the watch face, this time around, with 16% slimmer bezels. There’s also a sheet of Gorilla Glass 5 covering the display for scratch protection, and the adaptive refresh can now adjust between 1 and 60Hz, which should improve the efficiency of the always-on display mode.
Coupled with the 45mm model’s larger 420mAh battery – which is 35% larger than that found in the Pixel Watch 2 – the Pixel Watch 3 should offer “all day” battery life and up to 36 hours with battery saver mode enabled.
That’s still not amazing, and is probably due to Google sticking with the Snapdragon SW5100 instead of moving up to the more modern W5+ Gen 1. This is similar to the battery life that Apple still offers with its Apple Watch Series 9 and the watch will apparently charge 20% faster than the previous generation. I can’t help but be disappointed, though, especially as Huawei’s wearables continue to offer more than five days of battery life from their smartwatches while offering a similar array of features.
Still, there are other reasons to be cheerful about Google’s latest smart wearable and the first of these is the big new feature for this iteration: Loss of pulse detection. This feature does what it says on the tin.
It detects if “signs of pulselessness” are detected (in English, I take this to mean “YOU’RE HAVING A HEART ATTACK”), double checks this by calling extra sensors into play and then sounds an alarm and waits 20 seconds before dialling emergency services on a connected smartphone or via its own LTE connection. Unusually, the feature should be available in the UK pretty much straight away (“from September” to quote the press release), although it has not yet been cleared for use in the US.
Elsewhere, the Pixel Watch 3 now has ultra-wideband capabilities, allowing it to unlock your Pixel phone automatically when it’s nearby. And there’s an improved sleep mode; to my mind, this is a much-neglected area in smart wearables.
When I go to sleep, I don’t want to be jabbing multiple buttons on my smartwatch to make sure it doesn’t wake me up in the middle of the night and Google has, seemingly, recognised this. The Pixel Watch 3 will not only detect when you’ve gone to sleep but it will also automatically put itself into do not disturb mode, so even if you forget you shouldn’t be rudely awakened at 2am by a rogue notification.
Most of the other improvements are fitness-focused and it looks as if the software engineers have been watching Garmin for inspiration. There’s a new Morning Brief mode, which delivers a summary of health and fitness metrics, the weather for the day and your training load and readiness, progression towards training goals and more, all automatically delivered when you wake up in the morning. Those with Fitbit Premium subscriptions will also see workout recommendations here.
This mode draws on a number of new fitness features, including an improved Readiness score and a Cardio load indicator, to help you better balance activity and rest. The readiness score takes into account your sleep, heart rate variability and resting heart rate in an attempt to gauge whether today is a workout day or whether you should be resting.
The Cardio load indicator, meanwhile, is designed to show you how hard your heart is or has been working and the watch then uses this to deliver a target cardio load for each day. This should help those training for an event such as a 10km race, a marathon or a long bike ride, to better understand their fitness trends and whether they are over- or under-training.
Additionally, there’s a whole selection of new fitness features aimed at runners, with a new workout builder on the watch and the accompanying smartphone app that lets you more easily build complex target-driven interval-based training workouts. The Google Pixel Watch 3 can now broadcast your heart rate over Bluetooth to compatible exercise machines such as treadmills and exercise bikes.
Google has also tweaked the heart rate-sensing algorithm to ensure more reliable heart rate readings for runners and has added offline Google Maps – that’s a great move and means you don’t have to take your phone out if you’re going on a run in an unfamiliar location.
Finally, there’s a small handful of other, non-fitness related functions added to the Pixel Watch 3, including live camera view from Nest doorbells – including two-way talk – watch-based Google TV remote control and improved camera controls.
Google Pixel Watch 3 preview: Early thoughts
Despite the fact that the Pixel Watch continues to deliver disappointing battery life, there’s plenty in this update to look forward to. The fitness upgrades turn the Pixel Watch into something that’s much more like a Garmin rival than it has been previously, particularly the training load and workout builders, while the addition of an extra size means it will appeal to more people than before, too.
I’m also looking forward to seeing how offline Google Maps works as that’s a feature that isn’t available on Apple Watch – at least not without paying for a third-party app like Workoutdoors, anyway. And while it certainly sounds useful, I’d rather not get around to giving Loss of pulse detection a real-world workout.
Ultimately, there isn’t anything too dramatic here, though, and that’s the way it should be. And if Google keeps it up, improving the Pixel Watch steadily, year after year, it won’t be too long until it has a wearable that’s nearly as good as the Apple Watch. I’m already looking forward to the improvements the Pixel Watch 4 will bring, although I’m not hopeful that battery life will be among them.