Pixel Watch 5 review [Hands-On]: A great watch that’s missing features at launch

Seven days in, and I still can’t give you the whole story on the Pixel Watch 5. That’s not a dodge. Google’s workout builder, blood pressure trend reports and insulin resistance tracking don’t arrive until September, which means a chunk of what makes this watch new isn’t on my wrist yet.

So I’m reviewing the thing as it exists today, and I’ll come back and update this when the rest lands. If those features move the needle on the score, I’ll change the number and say so. I don’t expect they will.

Here’s the short version. The Pixel Watch 5 is a very good smartwatch that’s almost identical to the Pixel Watch 4, with a handful of genuine improvements and one that’s mostly a party trick. It does enough to justify the $50 price increase. If you already own a Watch 4, don’t upgrade.

On-device Gemini is the reason to care

When I reviewed the Pixel Watch 4, Gemini went dead the moment I left my phone at home and went for a run. I’d ask it to log a workout or set a timer and get nothing, so I’d stop mid-stride and swipe through faces like an animal.

That’s fixed. Gemini now handles basic tasks without a connection: timers, starting workouts, music playback, toggling water lock or Wi-Fi, opening specific apps. No phone, no cellular, and it’s noticeably quicker as a result.

Google also gave the interface a cosmetic pass. The lower half of the screen glows when you’re talking to the assistant, matching Google’s Neural Expressive design. It’s easier to see what you’ve actually said, and it stays out of the way.

The gestures are better than they sound

Double pinching your fingers in the air to open At A Glance became my default move within a couple of days. No touching the screen, no wrist contortion.

Previous Pixel Watches supported double pinch and wrist turn, but Google made them do more this year. Double pinch opens At A Glance from the watch face, opens the notification center, and scrolls through content when a scroll bar shows up in Gemini’s responses, your workout metrics or the wallet app. It toggles Maps views and manages the Recorder app too.

The wrist turn is now universal back navigation, and that one’s a big deal for me. Turning your watch away from you as a dismissal is intuitive in a way most gesture systems aren’t. A universal back gesture is one of the places where Google’s interface thinking beats Apple’s, the same way swiping in from either edge of an Android phone screen takes you back a page.

Those At A Glance chips live in the bottom half of the display, similar to Apple’s smart stack hints. When the system thinks it has something timely, you get a little button: an incoming Lyft ride, an ongoing workout, a boarding pass. Apps using Android’s Live Update feature should surface here, and swiping up shows more.

The GPS tracking noticed me dodging a golf cart

Google says it built the “most accurate GPS route-tracking ever on a Pixel Watch.” It pulled data from a worldwide network of GPS reference stations and traces rays from GPS satellites through 3D models of buildings to compensate for interference. Same dual-frequency hardware as last year, but Google claims the new method makes the Watch 5 two times more accurate than older models, and more accurate than the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and Garmin Fenix 8 Pro.

I haven’t run that Ultra 3 comparison yet. But walking a waterside path in Bayonne with an Apple Watch Series 11 on the other wrist, which is the closer price match anyway, Google did look slightly better. Both drew detailed maps. The Pixel captured my zigzags, the Apple smoothed them out.

I stepped off the trail twice, once for a flock of geese and once for a golf cart barreling down a bridge. Both watches caught the geese detour. Only the Pixel registered me getting out of the cart’s way.

None of this is about my obstacle-avoidance credentials. If every step gets mapped correctly, your actual distance is more accurate, which feeds your pace and cadence. I don’t personally need more precision than modern watches already deliver, and I’d argue you should be watching trends rather than individual numbers. But it’s a smart move and it appears well executed. I want to test it in dense city blocks before I fully sign off.

Where Apple still wins on workout data

Google and Fitbit wearables have always been better than Apple’s at automatically noticing I’m exercising. All three devices I wore on a long bike ride along the Delaware river caught the activity unprompted. The Apple Watch logged the most complete data.

Part of that is a privacy consent chain. Auto-detected walks, runs and rides usually skip location, because you never agreed to be tracked. Apple prompts you to confirm the detected activity, which effectively gets your buy-in for the location data. That’s my read on it, anyway.

Because I tapped “Record outdoor cycle” on the Series 11, it told me I rode 7.54 miles at an average speed of 8.8 MPH with 35 feet of elevation gain, plus a map of the trail. The Google Health app gave me 216 calories burned, an average heart rate of 104 bpm and 21 cardio load points. Apple showed all of those too.

When I remembered to manually start a bike workout on the Pixel for the ride back, it captured distance, path, elevation gain and speed just fine.

One evening I came home to a notification congratulating me on an elliptical session. Cross-referencing the time, the watch had decided my walk home was elliptical work. I guess my hips do lie. Fixing it took one tap on a suggested chip in the app, and Google renamed the exercise.

The AI watch faces only change the font

Google’s new watch face generator takes your prompt and produces a clock. That’s the pitch. The reality is narrower.

No matter what you type, it only affects the style of the clock font. Complication size and placement stay rigid. You can pick which complications fill the four arcs around the clock and choose a color palette, and that’s the extent of it. “Flowery nature vibe” and “woodland elves prancing around a magical forest” both come back as numbers in a different typeface.

My prompts produced good-looking results, including the elves and one I described as “smiley faces and emoji faces in a celebratory vibe.” I went back to the Photos watch face with pictures of myself and my loved ones anyway.

There are two new faces, Weave and Chronograph. Both are attractive, and the new Multicolor complication option adds some life. Still, Apple’s faces look better, particularly the ones with dynamic clock sizes, and Google has more styles to choose from.

Widgets are a different story. You can customize the pages that appear when you swipe sideways, and I had logging a morning workout, starting a recording, setting a timer and my favorite contacts all within a couple of swipes. The buttons are large and easy to hit, which matters more on a watch than it does anywhere else.

Setting it up took more updates than I expected

Before I could test much of anything, I had to update the Android software on the connected phone, a Pixel 11 Pro, then the Pixel Watch app, then the Google Health app, then restart both devices.

Then I went into the Play Store on the watch itself and updated at least eight apps: Health, ECG, Gemini, Messages, Pixel Watch Manager, Wear OS and Wear Media among them. Every time a feature was missing or broken during testing, the fix was another toggle buried in settings. Gemini. Gestures. Proactive Intelligence.

Consider that a warning. Buy any smartwatch at launch and you’re signing up for a long afternoon of updates and settings menus.

Sleep tracking got 15 percent more accurate, allegedly

I wore it to bed and was told I got 8 hours and 37 minutes of sleep, which I’ll take. Google updated its machine learning models and says the accuracy improvement makes sleep tracking fundamentally more reliable, to the tune of 15 percent.

I have no way to verify that. Did I really spend 50 minutes in deep sleep where a Watch 4 might have said 48? This is gooey science at best. Watch your trends, not your minutes.

Nearly everything new here is also rolling out to the Pixel Watch 4, including sleep breathing quality, blood pressure and insulin resistance trend tracking, the custom workout builder and “advanced strength training.” I couldn’t test any of it. It also doesn’t change the buying advice.

Google expanded the loss of pulse detection alerts it introduced in 2024 with something it calls breathing emergency detection. It’s only available in some European countries right now, and short of developing a persistent drop in oxygen saturation, I have no way to test it. Our editor in chief Aaron Souppouris has volunteered as tribute.

Battery anxiety isn’t really a thing here

The Pixel Watch 5 charges at the same rate as its predecessor, which is fine, because the Watch 4 was already quick. I got from roughly 3 percent to about 20 percent in a few minutes and walked into a 45-minute workout class without worrying about losing my metrics.

It matched the Apple Watch Series 11 in my testing so far. Both go almost a full two days. I’ve been running various software versions throughout this review, so treat that as provisional and I’ll update it once things settle.

Compared to the Fitbit Air I’ve been wearing daily since reviewing it in May, the Pixel doesn’t last as long, so I hit the charger more often. The Fitbit refills fast enough that I never think about it, though I do have to carry a charger everywhere.

The hardware is the Watch 4 with a nicer chip name

Physically, this is the Pixel Watch 4. Google’s own comparison chart lists a small display difference, with the newer watch using a 320ppi AMOLED panel while the older one is described as “custom.” In use, they’re the same.

Brightness tops out at up to 3,000 nits, same as last year. Plenty readable at that setting. In battery-saving mode, when the screen dims, I genuinely struggled to make out words.

The processor is a Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 Accelerated, versus the Watch 4’s Snapdragon W5 Gen 2. Same chip with more memory and slightly higher clock speeds. IP68 dust and water resistance on both.

The domed glass case and display still make the Pixel Watch feel more breakable than a Galaxy Watch 9 or an Apple Watch Series 11. I haven’t broken one yet, and the repairable design means I’m not losing sleep over it. It remains the only mainstream smartwatch with a replaceable screen and battery, which counts for something.

My review unit came in peachy canyon, which matched my Pixel 11 Pro in the same shade. Less charming: dark staining along the band’s edges after a week. It might be my new black purse leeching color. Replacement bands run from $50 to $200.

Who should buy it

Watch 4 owners, skip this one. Everything meaningful is coming to your watch anyway.

Everyone else gets a solid smartwatch with genuinely useful gestures, on-device Gemini that finally works when your phone isn’t around, and route tracking that caught a golf cart my Apple Watch missed. I still have reservations about the Google Health features locked behind Premium, though even without AI Coach the app is a straightforward place to keep your metrics.

The $50 increase buys enough. Just don’t buy it expecting the September features to be there when you open the box.