Smartwatches have been around for a long time now, but it feels like none of them have managed to hit that sweet spot between function, fashion, and, most importantly, battery life. While the Pixel Watch 2 has made many strides towards becoming the perfect watch, it has a few shortcomings that hold it back.
To set up the Pixel Watch 2 was incredibly easy. All you have to do is download the Watch app from the Google Play Store, turn Bluetooth on, and it is practically set up. The App lets you customize your watch face in multiple ways. Besides your usual notification setup, you’ll be able to change your gestures and watch preferences and set up a FitBit account. New Pixel Watch 2 owners also receive a free six-month trial of FitBit premium, which is a nice little bonus.
The Pixel Watch 2 watch faces are incredibly versatile and beautiful. Some simply for their ability to share information while being extremely simplified faces, while others are elaborate, sharing an excessive amount of communication with the user. While way more than I needed, it shows that there are faces for everyone, and the sheer amount of customizing that you can do to the faces beyond delightful colours is an excellent move for Google.
The ability to customize Google Assistant shortcuts on the Pixel Watch 2 was great for those who have specific everyday use cases for the assistant. Being able to start sending messages and setting timers all from shortcuts quickly only saves a few seconds but adds up over time and just makes it that much easier to use.
“The Pixel Watch 2 watch faces are incredibly versatile and beautiful.”
Fitbit has great integration with the Pixel Watch 2 with its ability to auto-detect exercise now as well. This has been a feature on plenty of watches before the Pixel Watch 2, but it’s nice to see it make an appearance here as well. This means you no longer have to manually track your exercise if you set up the app to allow for it. Within a few minutes of beginning a walk, I received an alert on my phone asking me if I was walking, and it automatically started tracking steps, heart rate, distance, and time, all on the home screen of the Pixel Watch 2.
Being able to set Google Calendar events and seeing them in Google Maps on the Pixel Watch 2 is a nice feature, along with the Gmail app being available for the Pixel Watch 2. It made reading and responding to emails on the go so much more simplified and more accessible to do with voice-to-text rather than having to pull out my phone. A feature I have not had to use, thankfully, is emergency location sharing, which shares your location with selected contacts until you turn it off. Again, thankfully, I have not had to use it, but I can see it becoming convenient in cases where you need someone to know your location.
The battery life is something that I knew wouldn’t blow me away, considering you can buy inexpensive watches that last upwards of days. I know my Pixel 7 Pros battery life is not the best, needing a midday charge at this point between using Bluetooth twenty-four hours a day and constantly running Spotify, so I was ready for a mediocre battery at best. I was correct, as over the past week, I’ve averaged roughly twenty-four-ish hours per charge.
“Fitbit has great integration with the Pixel Watch 2 with its ability to auto-detect exercise now as well.”
The first few days, it was hours as I could watch the battery percent tick down. During this time, there were a myriad of updates and features turned on that weren’t suited for me. So naturally, as I began to understand what I needed of the watch and more finely tuned it to fit my user experience, the battery wasn’t being siphoned off into apps that weren’t required, and it started to last a little longer.
A big move in the battery life for the Pixel Watch 2 is the quick charge. The charger is a four-pin magnetic charger. While the magnetization helps with placing the watch for charging, the fact that it can only be placed in a specific orientation is a minor issue but a pain nonetheless. It doesn’t hurt that the Pixel Watch 2 can be fully charged within an hour, sometimes less.
Overall, the Pixel Watch 2 is a great smartwatch. With the quick charging, incredibly customizable user-friendly experience, and the fact that it shares settings with your phone, so putting the watch into do not disturb mode will also, in turn, put your phone into that mode to help the overall use case for the Pixel Watch 2.
