So Google finally made a watch. Announced it Wednesday at I/O, first keynote theyve done in person since 2019, and the whole thing had that slightly rusty energy of a company remembering how to do a live event. Which, fair, all of us are still recalibrating for real rooms with real applause.
The Pixel Watch is the headline for me even though its clearly not the headline for Google: that was probably the AI stuff, the PaLM model, real-time translated captions, all the stuff Sundar spent twenty minutes on. But Ive been burned by Google hardware timelines enough times that a round watch face and a promise of "later this year" doesnt move me the way it apparently moved half of Twitter on Wednesday night.
Some background, because Ive been doing this blog long enough to have lived through the whole arc: I backed the original Pebble on Kickstarter in 2012. Wore it for two years, loved the e-ink screen, hated the buggy companion app. Then I did a stint with an early Moto 360 running Android Wear, which looked gorgeous and died by lunchtime every single day. Then nothing, for years, because Wear OS just sort of stagnated while Google bought Fitbit and everyone assumed something would eventually happen with it. Now it has. Sort of.
Heres my actual complaint: they didnt give a price. They didnt give a release date beyond "fall." They showed a domed glass face, a rotating crown (very Apple Watch, no ones pretending otherwise), and said it integrates Fitbit for health tracking, and thats it. No specs on battery life, which is the single thing that killed every smartwatch Ive owned. I dont care how pretty the display is if Im charging it every night on top of my phone. My current watch (a cheap Amazfit thing I bought two years ago for like $70) does five days on a charge and I have genuinely started resenting devices that cant match that.
The other stuff from the keynote was more concretely useful, honestly. The Pixel 6a is $449, ships in July, basically the same Tensor chip as the 6 and 6 Pro in a smaller cheaper body. Thats a real product with a real price I can react to. Pixel Buds Pro are $199, also July, with active noise cancellation which the regular Buds never had. Both of those I could see myself actually buying. The watch is a vibe and a press release.
I also want to flag, because nobody else will probably bother, that the AI Test Kitchen app they showed off is a weirdly good name for what is otherwise a fairly opaque thing — basically a sandbox to poke at their LaMDA conversational model in a few narrow use cases (one was imagining hiking trails, one was helping you brainstorm dog activities, I am not kidding). It felt like a company that has a very powerful thing internally and is extremely nervous about letting people near it unsupervised. Which, given how these chatbot demos tend to go off the rails, is probably the correct instinct.
Anyway. Its been a genuinely heavy week for tech news generally (I dont need to rehash what everyone else is writing about crypto or the Twitter deal, its everywhere already and Id just be repeating headlines at this point) so I wanted to write about the smaller thing that actually made me sit up a little: a watch company that isnt Google (Fitbit) getting absorbed into a hardware push from a company that isnt really a watch company either (Google), announced with almost none of the details that would let me decide if I want one.
Im rooting for it. Im just not holding my breath, and Im definitely not pre-ordering something with no listed price. Ask me again in the fall.