Google Pixel Watch 5 Review: Spot the difference

Design and screen

• Looks near-identical to Pixel Watch 4
• Premium domed Actua screen
• New colour options and strap finishes

Put the Google Pixel Watch 5 up against last year’s Pixel Watch 4, and you won’t be able to tell much of a difference – because there aren’t any real hardware changes on offer this year. Putting it on my wrist, as a long-time Pixel Watch 4 wearer, felt very familiar indeed. 

That said, if you liked the design of last year’s Pixel Watch, you’ll love the Pixel Watch 5. It’s very much still a premium-looking wearable, with the return of the iconic domed Actua 360 screen, available in either 1.2- or 1.4-inches depending on whether you go for the 41mm or 45mm variants. For context, I’ve been sent the larger 45mm watch for review purposes. 

The screen really is the standout of the Pixel Watch experience; that domed screen doesn’t just look nice, but the screen itself matches the curvature of the glass for a rather unique look. It means that, when you look at the watch side-on, you can still see a bit of what’s on screen – much like the curved phone screens that were all the rage in the late 2010s. 

It remains very bright at 3000 nits, which makes it easy to see and use, even during the ungodly bright and sunny summer we’re having in Blighty, and the vivid colours of the LTPO AMOLED panel lend themselves well to the vast array of watchfaces available on the wearable. 

Flanking that treat of a screen is the rotating crown, which continues to be a convenient way of scrolling through apps and particularly long WhatsApp notifications (we’ve all been there), with a press of the button doubling as a Home button. I do wish there was a little refinement here. It still doesn’t have any kind of haptic feedback, something offered by Apple’s competing Watch Series 11 and wearables like the Galaxy Watch 8 Classic and its rotating bezel.

Sitting just above the rotating bezel is the side button, used for accessing recent apps as well as activating Gemini, even if the latter is a little redundant now that the Watch supports Gemini raise-to-wake. 

The hybrid speaker and charging system that’s embedded on the left side of the Watch may be considered a bit of an eyesore, however, especially compared to an otherwise completely enclosed, shiny aluminium case. 

It has metal prongs that protrude ever so slightly to make contact with the cradle charger, so it can’t quite pass as a regular speaker grille – but the trade-off is a Watch that sits on its side and doubles up as a mini clock when charging, so it’s well worth it in my mind. 

And, as ever, the Watch 5 collection is available in a range of colour options including Olive, Canyon, Obsidian and the Fog finish I was provided for review, along with a wide range of straps tailored to both exercise and fashion. The quick release system used here makes it very easy to switch them out on the fly too. 

It also remains just as durable as last year’s option, once again offering 5ATM protection that’ll survive up to 50m underwater, along with IP68 for more general protection against dust and water ingress. 

Software and features

• Faster everyday performance
• Offline Gemini support
• Clean, feature-rich Wear OS

While much of the hardware is familiar, the Pixel Watch 5 does at least offer a new processor for slightly speedier performance. The Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 Accelerated is, according to Google, 20% faster than the Pixel Watch 4’s W5 Gen 2 – though neither are exactly the best-performing Android wearable chipset around. That’d go to the Snapdragon Wear Elite found in the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Watch 9.

Still, in day-to-day use, there’s very little difference between the Pixel and Galaxy Watch. It feels fluid, responsive and super smooth, with apps and menus opening slightly faster than the outgoing Pixel Watch 4. It’s not a day-and-night difference, but enough that I have noticed it in the past week of use.

Google is at least putting that additional power to good use; it allows Gemini to run offline on the watch for basic queries like setting timers, opening apps and starting exercises for the first time. 

We’ve also got basic Gemini Intelligence integration, mainly in the form of quick actions based on incoming messages. Full disclosure; I’ve not had this appear once during my week of use, suggesting it’s fairly limited for now. 

Other new features on this year’s watch focus mainly on bedtime and sleep. You can now get your watch to run automations – like pausing your smartphone audio – once it detects you’re asleep, while smart alarm tech aims to wake you up in your lightest phase of sleep in the morning. 

The new Morning Brief is another nice touch, giving you not only your readiness score but also an overview of how you slept and handy extras like the weather in your area and any upcoming calendar events. It’s a nice snapshot without overloading you with too much data first thing in the morning. 

You can also create AI-generated watch faces on the watch itself, with either preset options or the ability to describe what you want yourself, but it’s a little bit basic. You can customise the font of the clock, but not much else, and using it means you’re limiting yourself to just a couple of complications.

Elsewhere, it’s business as usual; stock Wear OS 7 is a pretty nice experience on the watch, with full support for Android notifications and quick replies, hands-freeGemini, Google Wallet and a range of third-party apps from Google Play. 

I do wish Google had taken a leaf out of Samsung’s One UI book though; elements like custom tiles and Samsung’s per-app sorting of notifications would bolster that already-solid experience. 

In terms of connectivity, you’ve got both Wi-Fi and LTE models available, along with 64GB of onboard storage for your apps, music (Spotify supports offline playback) and the like – double that of the Pixel Watch 4. 

Health and fitness tracking

• Headline upgrades aren’t here yet
• Strong all-round health and fitness support
• AI-powered Health Coach is excellent

While Google hasn’t changed all that much on the general software front, it has a few new bells and whistles in the health and fitness department – well, it will, at some point in the next few months.

You see, while Google has touted features like blood pressure and insulin trends, sleep breathing quality monitoring and support for guided strength workouts as key new upgrades of the Pixel Watch 5 experience, none of them are available in the UK at release. 

The support for tailored strength or HIIT circuits is coming in September, and you won’t get your first blood pressure and insulin resistance trend reports until the end of October, as it needs a full month of data first. And, features like sleep breathing quality are simply marked as ‘coming soon’ with no actual release date in sight. 

Even features that are there at launch aren’t straightforward; those in the UK and certain EU countries get breathing emergency detection, which essentially detects instances where you’re not breathing and contacts emergency services, but the feature isn’t available in the US. It’s a real hodgepodge of rollouts and supported regions.

With that massive caveat/moan out of the way, there is still a lot to love about the Pixel Watch 5’s suite of health and fitness tracking tools – maybe not for Pixel Watch 4 owners, but definitely for those coming from older Pixel wearables or competing Wear OS watches. 

The Pixel Watch 5 measures a wide range of metrics in a bid to give you the best snapshot of your health possible, all outlined both on the watch and the accompanying Google Health app. These include elements like heart rate, resting heart rate, blood oxygen, and skin temperature alongside movement metrics like steps taken, floors climbed, distance walked, and energy burned.

And even without the new sleep breathing quality feature available just yet, sleep tracking remains a strength of the Pixel Watch experience. Google claims it’s 15% more accurate at detecting sleep stages than the outgoing Pixel Watch 4, and while I can’t verify those claims, the Watch did closely match the results from my Oura Ring 5. Both accurately reflected how I’d felt the following day, with only minor variations of a few minutes in stage tracking. 

It takes all that data, combines it with recent exercise data, stress and other factors to deliver a daily readiness score, essentially giving you a gauge of how much you should push yourself that day, along with a tailored weekly cardio goal to aim for. 

The watch also supports over 50 forms of exercise, covering all the standard options like indoor and outdoor running, swimming and cycling, along with sports like football, basketball and recreational activities like hiking. It’s a broad range, with exercise-specific metrics and various layouts available on your wrist that you can switch between with a tap or swipe. 

Dual-band GPS keeps things nice and tight on outdoor walks and runs, with map overlays available on the Google Health app that tracked where I actually was – though I was sometimes waiting up to 30 seconds for the watch to grab a GPS signal. 

Google claims a 2x improvement in accuracy specifically in urban environments by utilising Google Maps data, but I did still see a few wobbles on a GPS-tracked walk through Canary Wharf. It’s not quite up to the standards set by the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 and Huawei Watch GT Runner 2 then, but for most people, it’s more than enough. 

It all comes together in the Google Health app with Google Health Coach, the company’s AI-powered health chatbot. The AI will analyse your data and send you updates throughout the day, as well as analysing your general movement, exercise and sleep data to save you from delving into various graphs and stats yourself – but really, it’s all about that chatbot. 

And unlike the AI chatbots we’ve seen from the likes of Whoop, Oura and co, Google’s option is genuinely good. Like, the best I’ve used yet. 

It doesn’t produce paragraphs of word salad whenever you ask it a question; it’s more the opposite. It keeps things simple and genuinely conversational, and it doesn’t stop at asking how you slept or how your HRV has been the past few months – it’s pretty proactive. 

It can create tailored exercise plans based on your data and your preferences; just tell it what you want to do, the equipment you have and the goal you’ve got in mind and it takes all the effort out. The plans even come with videos showing you how to do various exercises and stretches if you’re unfamiliar. 

And it only gets better the more you tell it; I, for example, told it that I go into the office on Mondays and work from home for the rest of the week. It not only tailored my exercise plan to accommodate that, but it also uses that information in the messages it sends throughout the day. 

It’s that level of personalisation you’re not going to get from any of the competition – though you do have to pay for the privilege at £7.99/$9.99 per month.  

Battery life

• Around 45-50 hours of battery life
• Full recharge in an hour
• Cradle charging system

The needle hasn’t moved much when it comes to battery life on the latest generation of Pixel watches, but that’s not as big a criticism as it might sound.

The larger 45mm variant I’ve been testing has a 455mAh battery that Google claims can last 40 hours in general use – though I’ve found it can go a little further, around 50 hours, before running completely flat. 

That’s a pretty sizeable gap in battery life compared to what I’ve seen with the likes of the Galaxy Watch 9, the Apple Watch Series 11 and even the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2, which Samsung claims has the biggest battery in any of its brand’s wearables to date – and that’s with elements like the always-on display and optional tracking features active. 

On the flip side, it’s not the longest-lasting Wear OS-toting smartwatch either; the OnePlus Watch 3, for example, can last up to 5 days in its full Wear OS mode or 16 days in its more basic form. And I’d imagine the smaller 41mm variant to not last quite as long either. But still, I think that what Google offers here is a nice middle ground.

Thankfully, when it does need a top-up, it’s a rather rapid experience, going from flat to full in little over an hour with the included charging cradle. Again, that’s notably faster than both of the most recent Galaxy Watches, and makes quick 15-minute top-ups while you’re in the shower all the more impactful. 

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Should you buy it?