Looking at the Google Store page that compares the Pixel Watch with existing Fitbit smartwatches (https://store.google.com/magazine/google_pixel_watch_compare), I'm not sure why most people would buy the Pixel Watch. It's more expensive than the Sense 2 and Versa 4, but it is not a clear upgrade in terms of features.
To make the pixel watch not look like shit? There is almost nothing the pixel watch is offering that makes it better than their fitbit watches. This is embarrassing for google.
Right, especially 1 day battery life with Pixel Watch vs 6 days with Versa 4? So for $100+ more dollars you are getting...WearOS and a circular face instead of square? What am I missing that is so great about the Pixel Watch?
I really don't see the need for cutting edge CPU in a watch. Even very old chips should have more than enough power for what you need from even the smartest of watches, refined software and battery optimization are far more important than raw power.
There's power efficiency reasons to prefer a more modern CPU. It's not that you need the speed, at all. It's the nanometer / process size. The more tightly packed the transitors are, the shorter distance electrons have to flow and so requires less energy.
This watch is more expensive, by a lot, but will also consume more battery than other current generation watches.
I'd like to be a part of the meetings where it was decided to go forward with the product. "We're not price-competitive, we're using a SoC from the Apple Watch 4 era, and the bezels are wide enough to ride a bicycle on."
"Looks good, when does manufacturing start?"
"I'm sorry, ma'am, perhaps not I've explained myself clearly..."
I mean, is this some tax write off scheme to balance profitable products? What business hinkiness am I missing that makes this a viable product? Because what I'm not imaging is someone in the viewing audience saying, "wow, it's about time Google, this is the watch I've been waiting for!"
It's me, I'm the person who's been waiting for this watch.
I want a nice-looking, curved-screen watch that feels snappy and fluid and has a non-terrible UI (so not Samsung or FitBit), has decent Wear OS update policy (so not Huawei or Xiaomi), and is compatible with an Android phone (not Apple, which otherwise would be ideal).
I guess they made the watch for me personally. I will buy it while fully realizing they will drop it before the third year comes — at least I'll have a nice Android watch for these two years.
Google lost interest in smart watches for years, and now we're supposed to trust them again? I had a watch with Android Wear, after the updates stopped Google's own apps started losing features they had when I bought the watch (like offline music support).
I'd rather buy a watch from somebody that doesn't treat it like a small side business they can shut down at any moment. Plus, this hardware is very underwhelming.
I'm glad they released Wear OS 3.5 and hope it soon comes to other watches. When Samsung and Google merged OSes merged to make Wear OS 3, it didn't have Wear OS apps available and was only available on Samsung's watches. Wear OS 3.5 adds Wear OS apps and should be available for other watches.
The Galaxy Watch 4 and 5 should get apps. Fossil has Gen6 series that should get update.
* If you're in iOS user and want an iPhone on your wrist, get a iWatch
* If you like to incinerate cash, buy fireworks... or this watch. The lack of compatible wristbands is enough reason to avoid, let alone the inevitable outcome of you losing access to your investment once Google drops support for bringing a half-baked product to market.
I had an iwatch. The battery life was so short (at most 24 hours, less if using it to track a hike or ski day) that I finally got tired of using it. It has a slightly weird strap system. Mine kept coming off and eventually it fell off and cracked the screen slightly.
I switched to a garmin watch and battery life is great (a week+, and at least a couple of longer hikes or ski days doesn't kill it when tracking exercise), it's also lasted much better and not broken when I dropped it - I have the sapphire something screen, a harder screen.
The watches have access to the apps you opt into, so there is a security possibility of exposing information. The iwatch made me log in every time, such a pain, because it would ask me to log in multiple times a day. The garmin doesn't have a log in. The garmin forwards every message on my screen from my android to my watch and I can reply, while the apple required me to load an app on the phone or watch, adjust each one. I love the garmin, glad I moved on from the iwatch.
Google/Alphabet should stick to internet infrastructure based products. It is increasingly becoming evident that they don't have customers confidence nor are they keeping up with the times with such botched launches & cancellations.
Playing on your strengths is not a bad deal. If they cull some of these product lines for good, and reinvest in core set of Workspace products, better search & competing GCP with AWS/Azure seriously (good documentation, product support etc), it will go a long way to recover the trust & brand value. You don't want to be seen as the Yahoo! of 2020s. That's a death sentence in slow motion.
As a computer scientist, Alphabet is no longer my first preference to get hired. The lustre of the company has jaded considerably in last 5 years (with the exception of AI ventures)
Honestly, in FAANG category, keeping the bad PR aside, the Facebook engineering team feels much more talented actually. I have a lot of friends in both places, but the type of projects they are churning right now at their open source end is much better than Google AFAIK. NVIDIA is also very creatively handing their sortware engineering.
Outside of that category, I feel Huggingface is doing some incredible things to bring ML at scale. Then there are a slew of small startups such as Adept, Anthropic and Mosaic which are doing very interesting things too. You is reimagining search with the help of vector search. A few non-profit such as AllenAI are also really competitive. A lot of value prop is being created by small teams at Vercel, Railwayapp etc, which are something to look out for
The 10mm (5 mm around) bezel, sneakily hidden in marketing photos < my calculations are correct) takes up about 25% of the listed 41 mm watch diameter...
Very questionable hardware design decisions. A raised watch crystal to mimic the Apple Watch, more likely to scratch and shatter (with zero aftermarket support for add on protection). A traditional round case, less useful for displaying text and mostly suitable for displaying analog watch faces. Only comes in a "small" 41mm diameter size, the screen display further reduced with the internal bezel and round case.
Funny, the Pixel Watch has been added to the Fitbit web site, where on the comparison table it looks quite inferior to Fitbit offerings and costs $50 more. But wait, it has features like "Google Play Store" and "Gmail" which no one asked for.
A Fitbit is better than this in almost every way. As someone who's been wearing a smart watch of some kind for nearly a decade at this point, there are only really three players in this race: Fitbit, Garmin, and Apple. Everything else on the market is a joke by comparison. That's setting aside the fact that nobody should ever trust a Google product launch of hardware at this point.
You probably already know this, but Fitbit is now a Google product. One would imagine this Pixel Watch have more than a few things in common with some Fitbit products.
41 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 48.2 ms ] threadTo me the Google watch looks a little blob-esque and cheap. Similar to the Nickelodeon splat tat logo.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/spongebob/images/1/11/Nick...
"Google kills off Pixel Watch after low consumer demand in favor of FitBit."
A word to the wise, don't invest your own time and money into google products unless you want to gamble.
Then they merge the two into "Watch" the new alphabet company.
Not like they didn't do that before with their chat apps.
I clicked the link and thought "God, that looks like shit." And Google is going to cancel support for it in a year and a half anyway.
Here we go again... This seems like a product explicitly designed to fail.
This watch is more expensive, by a lot, but will also consume more battery than other current generation watches.
"Looks good, when does manufacturing start?"
"I'm sorry, ma'am, perhaps not I've explained myself clearly..."
I mean, is this some tax write off scheme to balance profitable products? What business hinkiness am I missing that makes this a viable product? Because what I'm not imaging is someone in the viewing audience saying, "wow, it's about time Google, this is the watch I've been waiting for!"
I want a nice-looking, curved-screen watch that feels snappy and fluid and has a non-terrible UI (so not Samsung or FitBit), has decent Wear OS update policy (so not Huawei or Xiaomi), and is compatible with an Android phone (not Apple, which otherwise would be ideal).
I guess they made the watch for me personally. I will buy it while fully realizing they will drop it before the third year comes — at least I'll have a nice Android watch for these two years.
I'd rather buy a watch from somebody that doesn't treat it like a small side business they can shut down at any moment. Plus, this hardware is very underwhelming.
The Galaxy Watch 4 and 5 should get apps. Fossil has Gen6 series that should get update.
* If you're in iOS user and want an iPhone on your wrist, get a iWatch
* If you like to incinerate cash, buy fireworks... or this watch. The lack of compatible wristbands is enough reason to avoid, let alone the inevitable outcome of you losing access to your investment once Google drops support for bringing a half-baked product to market.
Thanks for your review of a product that isn’t even out yet
I switched to a garmin watch and battery life is great (a week+, and at least a couple of longer hikes or ski days doesn't kill it when tracking exercise), it's also lasted much better and not broken when I dropped it - I have the sapphire something screen, a harder screen.
The watches have access to the apps you opt into, so there is a security possibility of exposing information. The iwatch made me log in every time, such a pain, because it would ask me to log in multiple times a day. The garmin doesn't have a log in. The garmin forwards every message on my screen from my android to my watch and I can reply, while the apple required me to load an app on the phone or watch, adjust each one. I love the garmin, glad I moved on from the iwatch.
Playing on your strengths is not a bad deal. If they cull some of these product lines for good, and reinvest in core set of Workspace products, better search & competing GCP with AWS/Azure seriously (good documentation, product support etc), it will go a long way to recover the trust & brand value. You don't want to be seen as the Yahoo! of 2020s. That's a death sentence in slow motion.
As a computer scientist, Alphabet is no longer my first preference to get hired. The lustre of the company has jaded considerably in last 5 years (with the exception of AI ventures)
I am curious. Which companies would be your top preferences?
Outside of that category, I feel Huggingface is doing some incredible things to bring ML at scale. Then there are a slew of small startups such as Adept, Anthropic and Mosaic which are doing very interesting things too. You is reimagining search with the help of vector search. A few non-profit such as AllenAI are also really competitive. A lot of value prop is being created by small teams at Vercel, Railwayapp etc, which are something to look out for
https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/shopping/behold-the-fat-...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/shopping/behold-the-fat-...
Funny, the Pixel Watch has been added to the Fitbit web site, where on the comparison table it looks quite inferior to Fitbit offerings and costs $50 more. But wait, it has features like "Google Play Store" and "Gmail" which no one asked for.