Pixel Watch review: Beautiful, fast and way too expensive

Enlarge / The Pixel Watch. It's a perfect little round pebble. Ron Amadeo

SPECS AT A GLANCE: Pixel Watch FILTER 1.2 inch, 450×450 OLED (320 ppi) SE Wear OS 3.5 (Android 11) CPU Samsung Exynos 9110 dual core (10nm)

Two 1.15GHz Cortex A53 cores (plus one low-power Cortex M33 coprocessor)

RAM 2 GB GPUs ARM Mali T720 MP1 GPU STORAGE 32 GB NETWORKING 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS, NFC, LTE optional CUT 41×12.3mm LESTER 36g (without tape) BATTERY 294mAh THE PRICE $349 (Wi-Fi) $399 (LTE) OTHER ADVANTAGES 5 ATM water resistance, ECG sensor, SPO2 sensor

It's hard to overstate how important the Apple Watch has become. It is the flagship device of the entire Apple ecosystem, with a 30% attach rate on new iPhone sales in the United States. There's nothing quite like the Apple Watch for Android phones, which makes it the reason to shift ecosystems from Android to iOS. If you're already on iOS, this is one of the main reasons to stick around. The Apple Watch is Apple's biggest lockdown weapon, and Google has spent the past few years doing nothing to combat it.

Google may have entered this market first with Android Wear in 2014, but its hardware progress came to a screeching halt in 2015 and hasn't budged much since. This was partly due to the company relying on Qualcomm SoCs, which have been released with the same basic chip design (under different model numbers) for six consecutive years. Additionally, Wear OS hasn't seen the greatest development effort, with major releases only being released in 2014, 2017, and 2018. 2018 was also around the time Google quietly abandoned Wear OS app development.

It's the usual situation: an Apple product has a focused, vertically integrated, laser-straight line of development, while the comparable Google product has to deal with an ever-changing group of half-interested hardware partners, the Google's internal attention deficit disorder. , and at least one major rebranding. The Apple Watch fled with the market as Google's efforts failed, with the company grabbing around 3% of the wearable market for several years.

Google's first own-brand smartwatch represents the first fruits of a major multi-year reboot of Google's smartwatch ambitions. Google started to show interest in Wear OS again in 2019 when it spent $40 million on some sort of technology from the Fossil Group, saying it would help improve Google's smartwatch platform. Google's wearables took over last year with the company's purchase of Fitbit, which was (slightly) integrated into the development of the Pixel Watch.

However, the real catalyst is the ability of the company