Google's hardware event happened today, the "Made by Google" one, streamed at 10am Eastern, which meant I was watching it on my phone during my kid's cereal-and-cartoons hour instead of paying attention like a responsible parent. Pixel 7 is $599, Pixel 7 Pro is $899, both up for preorder now with a release date of October 13th. Fine. Expected. Not what I want to talk about.
The Pixel Watch is what actually got me. It went on sale today, same day as the announcement, which is genuinely unusual for Google. They usually announce something in October and then make you wait six weeks while they figure out supply chain stuff. $349 for the Bluetooth/WiFi version, $399 if you want LTE. Round face, that little crown-style button, comes bundled with six months of Fitbit Premium since Google finally folded Fitbit's software into the watch after owning the company since 2019.
Here's my complaint, and it's a small one but it's mine: to actually set the thing up out of the box, you need a Pixel phone. Not "an Android phone." A Pixel. I've got a OnePlus sitting on my desk that I use as a backup device and apparently that doesn't count for initial pairing, even though the watch runs Wear OS same as basically every other Android watch on the market. You can reportedly move it to a non-Pixel Android phone later, after the initial setup dance is done, but the first-run experience is gated behind owning Google's own hardware. That's a weirdly Apple move for a company that's spent a decade selling itself as the open alternative.
I get why they're doing it — sell more Pixel 7s, tie the ecosystem together, whatever the slide deck said. Doesn't mean I have to like it. If you're going to build on Wear OS, which is supposed to be the shared platform, at least let the onboarding work with any phone running it.
Battery life is the other thing people are already grumbling about on Twitter (or wherever people are grumbling today, that platform's whole ownership situation is its own mess right now and not one I feel like getting into on a Thursday). Reports are pointing at roughly 24 hours on a charge, which puts it well behind an Apple Watch SE in real-world terms even though the SE starts at $249, a hundred bucks cheaper than the base Pixel Watch. I've worn a Fitbit Charge for the better part of three years — the strap finally cracked this summer and I taped it back together like an idiot rather than spend $130 on a replacement. Going from a week of battery to one day is a real adjustment even if the health tracking is supposedly much better now.
None of this means the watch is bad. The screen is genuinely nice in the hands-on photos going around, that domed glass look actually looks like a watch instead of a rounded rectangle strapped to your wrist, which is more than I can say for most of the competition. I just think the launch-day framing everyone's going to write today is "Google finally has a real smartwatch" and the thing nobody's going to lead with is "also you need to already own our phone to turn it on." That's the part that actually matters if you're the person standing in a Best Buy trying to decide what to buy your partner for their birthday next month.
I'm not buying one today. Partly the pairing thing, partly I just replaced my daily driver phone in July and don't have the budget for a watch on top of it, partly, and this is the honest reason, I've never worn a smartwatch for longer than about four months before going back to a normal Casio because I get tired of charging something every night. Maybe the Fitbit integration changes that calculus for other people. My money's on it not changing anything for me.
Anyway. Preorders are live if you want in. I'll probably write something longer once actual review units are out in a couple weeks and we know if the battery numbers hold up outside Google's own marketing copy, because those numbers almost never hold up outside the marketing copy.