Google is now on its 4th version of the Pixel Watch and things are starting to mature nicely. I mean, I’d hope so since we’re running back the same exact design for the 4th year in a row, but as one of the best watch designs in the industry, I’m not about to take issue there. What we want to see in a Pixel Watch 4 are improvements in display, battery life, performance, fitness tracking, and the software. In all of those areas, I think Google has made good enough improvements to keep this watch on your wrist.

We’ve been testing the Pixel Watch 4 (45mm) that Google sent over for review purposes for a solid 2 weeks now and have done just about all of the testing we need. We have slept with this watch on, sweated through hours and hours of pickleball abuse, and took it everywhere with LTE active to make sure we never lost connection. The Pixel Watch 4 has certainly been our wrist companion through a lot in recent days, which means we’ve also used the heck out of the new little charger (that we love).

Let’s dive into some thoughts in our Pixel Watch 4 review.

What do you need to know about the Pixel Watch 4?

Design and display. Should you look at a Pixel Watch 4 next to any of the previous Pixel Watch models, you probably won’t notice anything dramatically different. This watch design is very much like the original and the 2 and 3 before it. That’s not a bad thing, since this watch truly is a looker, but if you wanted a big refresh like we got from the Pixel 8 to the Pixel 9, this isn’t it.

That said, Google did make one pretty big improvement that I do think former Pixel Watch owners will notice during use. The display is pretty awesome now. Google is calling the display the Actua 360 because it’s more domed, more bubbly, and more edge-to-edge. With Material 3 Expressive being fuller and more bold behind the display, you really get this cool scrolling, domed effect as you use this watch. It’s so hard to explain, but all of the content just expands to the top of the display like never before, almost as if it’s floating before your eyes. Tiles float in, pages scroll through the edges up to this bubbled glass, buttons appear (and likely are) bigger, and the animations everywhere all seem so perfectly built to showcase this cover.

Oh, we have peak brightness up to 3000 nits too, so sunny day usage is a thing you can do now. And yeah, the watch has been plenty bright for me when outdoors during testing.

I will point out that Google is still only using Gorilla Glass 5 as a protective layer and that’s the same soft material used on previous models. It’ll scratch for sure. I haven’t yet scratched this Pixel Watch 4, but I won’t be surprised at all on the day it happens. Thankfully, Google is at least making this watch repairable, a first for Pixel Watches. You can replace both the display and battery, so if you do (and will) scratch this display, you can always get a fresh one.

As for the rest of the design, this is familiar. We have an aluminum case, rotating crown with haptics, another button for recent apps or Gemini, the same band system that fixes directly to the case, and two sizes (41mm or 45mm). This is a minimal, modern shape that stands out to me as the best of smartwatches. Google has managed to create a watch that looks both watch-like and tech-forward. It’s sleek on the wrist, pairs with whatever you are wearing, and is doing the exact opposite of the excessiveness of the Apple Watch Ultra.

For colors, we have a polished silver, matte black, or this satin moonstone (it’s blueish) that I’ve been wearing; no gold option this year. I have 6.75″ wrists and this 45mm wears nicely to me without looking too big. The 41mm would look great as well, but I’ll take the bigger size in this situation for the battery life boost every day. More on battery life in a minute!

This is a beautiful watch, it’s just not necessarily new. That’s fine.

Lift to talk Gemini. On the Pixel Watch 4, Google Assistant is gone and has been replaced by Gemini. If you want assistant-like actions to happen, you now use Google’s AI assistant to do everything from simple tasks (like setting a timer) to asking for much more complex tasks. You all know that I’m not a big AI fan and I certainly don’t use Gemini to its fullest. However, on this Pixel Watch 4, I’ve used it much more than I expected to and that’s because there is this really cool new gesture that fires up Gemini with a simple lift of the wrist.

So on the Pixel Watch 4, there is a new option called “Raise to Talk” that allows you to flip your wrist to wake the watch and then raise it toward your face to activate Gemini. You don’t have to shout “Hey Google!” or press a button, it just activates with a blue glow at the bottom of the screen to let you know you can go ahead and ask Gemini to do stuff. There are some sensitivity settings on the watch to adjust how easily it activates or how softly you can speak to it. I’ve had to adjust both of those settings to get to a spot that seems to activate Gemini less accidentally and also to listen to me in quieter situations.

I basically refuse to shout “Hey Google” at this point in my life and that has really reduced my usage of Google Assistant and Gemini in recent years. This gesture has absolutely allowed me to get back into using Google’s assistant and to tryout Gemini stuff I was previously avoiding. This gesture is great when I’m cooking, my hands are full or dirty, and I need to look up a conversion or set a new timer or just ask Gemini for some info. I also used it yesterday after playing pickleball and left having gone through some serve frustrations that I finally dialed back in at the end of the session. I told Gemini, with the raise of my wrist, to “Make a new Google Keep note for ‘Pickleball Reminders’” of things I need to remind myself of before playing each time. I added a couple of items all in one conversation and without having to press a button or shout that awful keyword combo.

The Gemini experience isn’t perfect here, though. I had a situation where someone messaged me about an event happening that night and Gemini attempted to offer a smart reply. The event was on my calendar, but it didn’t (or couldn’t) look at that like my Pixel 10 Pro can. So it just offered a random time as a reply. The event started at 5PM, but it just said, “7PM, see you there!” That seems…not great.

In general, I think something as simple as this raise-to-talk gesture has made Gemini more easily accessible and that has allowed me to at least use it more often. Is Gemini better than Assistant on a watch? It might be for some, maybe not for others. Google just flipped this switch and so far things are promising, so we’ll go with it.

Fitbit stuff. As a fitness tracking solution, I still think Fitbit is about as good as it gets for the majority of people. The app is clean, easy to understand and read, tracks all of the most important metrics, there are helpful insights around every corner, and we finally have a dark mode. Google is also planning to release a major upgrade to the Fitbit app experience in the coming weeks that should bring more visual improvements and introduce a health coach powered by AI.

I’m one of those people that loves health data and can’t cut off this addiction to looking at it each day. Like, I know my resting heart rate is upper-50s and that my sleep score rarely gets out of the 80s, so if those two things are off, something in my life has probably changed. With Fitbit, I get those two pieces of information right when and where I need them, but we’re still getting heart-rate variability (HRV), skin temperature, cardio load, and daily readiness scores, which might not be truly useful except when they are. For example, I’ve gotten pretty heavy with workouts the past two days, had an extra beer last night, went to bed far too late, and my readiness score is telling me I should probably chill. And you know what? My body actually does feel like it needs a day off, even if I won’t give it one. But that information is a nice reminder that I am being tracked and there is data to help make recommendations that I can decide to listen to or not.

With the Pixel Watch 4 doing the tracking, all of the Fitbit stuff is just built-in and tracks automatically. There isn’t a lot of setup out of the box. Sleep tracking happens automatically, which is probably the most important one. You can also monitor low or high heart rate zones, run an ECG, and find out if you have an irregular heart rhythm.

As far as accuracy goes, heartrate and sleep and readiness have all aligned with my Oura ring. Nothing has been far outside of its numbers, so I tend to believe what the Pixel Watch 4 is reporting back. The only outlier is in calories burned during workouts. The Pixel Watch 4 is suggesting that your boy is burning it all, while the Oura Ring is much more conservative. For example, after 3 hours of pickleball play the other day, the Pixel Watch 4 thought I burned 2,000 calories, while the Oura Ring had me at 1,100. And it’s like that every time. I don’t know what exactly to take from that, but that calorie burn seems high from the Pixel Watch 4.

Overall, Fitbit remains my favorite software experience for fitness tracking, far above Samsung Health and Apple Health. The Oura Ring app has gotten really great lately, so it would be a close 2nd. I just think this is the cleanest, easiest-to-digest health and fitness tracking system for most people, while still doing the advanced stuff without making a mess of the numbers you need to see the most.

Battery life. With the Pixel Watch 3, I remember Google being shy about battery life numbers and underselling the amount of time you’d have that watch on wrist before needing to charge. For the Pixel Watch 4, they are finally promising big improvements in the area, all without much change internally, as they believe software improvements will lead to greater efficiency.

For the Pixel Watch 4 (45mm) that I’ve tested, Google is suggesting 40 hours of use with the always-on display (AOD) active. I got close to that in my testing on days where I did absolutely nothing except wear the watch all day and night, so we’re talking about no physical activity tracking, just the daily notification waves and sleep tracking. For usage like that, I was at 100% at 9AM and then around 55% the following morning with a need to charge by that night. Google says 40 hours and I think that’s right, with AOD active.

With AOD off, I had a charge that included 5.5 hours of pickleball tracking over 2 days, 2 nights of sleep tracking, and waking up on the 3rd morning with 13% battery remaining. That’s really, really great battery life. But I also had multiple days where I started at 100%, tracked a lengthy workout, slept with the watch, and needed to charge before the 2nd night of sleep, all with AOD off. I then had a 2-day period of no workouts and AOD off and still needing to charge before night 2’s sleep. So my results were not super consistent and I have no idea how that first charge with AOD off lasted as long as it did.

My gut tells me that once I adjusted the raise-to-wake Gemini to the highest setting (that I talked about above), that it really started to impact battery life, as it constantly fired up with almost any lifting motion. I’d turn that down and do more testing, but it is one of the best new features and I’ve been using it enough that I don’t think that would be that helpful.

Here’s my takeaway after 2 weeks of battery testing – the Pixel Watch 4 could last you the 40 hours that Google suggests (with AOD on) if you aren’t doing any heavy workouts and are just wearing the watch. With the always-on display turned to off, you should be able to push things to 48+ hours.

New charger. Google switched-up the charging situation for the 3rd time with the Pixel Watch 4, dropping the PINs in favor of a new sideways dock with magnets. This thing is awesome. For one, the back of the Pixel Watch 4 is now just the health sensor without the weird PIN or wireless charging mechanism. Now, when you need to charge after those 2 days of use, you just take it off the wrist and slap the non-crown side onto the charger to let it do its thing. The watch then presents you with the time, battery status, and how long it’ll take to get to 100%.

In the past, I’ve not been a fan of Pixel Watch charging solutions. The original watch had wireless charging that was too slow and the charger didn’t have strong enough magnets. For the 2 and the 3, they switched to a PIN system that was just annoying to use, as you had to remember each time how the watch needed to attach to it. It also wasn’t fast. This new magnetic dock is super easy to attach to and it is quite fast. From 20% to 100% charge, this thing took only 40 minutes and then I was back to wearing it. The Pixel Watch 3 took at least an hour or more for a similar charge.

So you have a new charger that is easier to use, turns your watch into a bit of a desktop clock, and it brings major improvements in charging speeds. This thing is a win all around.

Complaints almost solved (some of them). In all of my previous Pixel Watch reviews, I had a set of very specific software complaints that I begged Google to address. While they haven’t in the Pixel Watch 4, I do think there are improvements that have made the experience far less annoying.

For one, there still isn’t an option to wake the watch display with notifications, and that seems ridiculous at this stage in the game. Every other smartwatch has this setting, yet Google just won’t add it for reasons I’m not sure I get. That said, the wrist-twist motion on the Pixel Watch 4 that wakes the watch seems to be greatly improved over previous models. That means the odd angles that might not have turned on the display in previous watches will now wake the watch, so you can check notifications more regularly. Again, not the solution I want, but I haven’t had as many issues with missed notifications this time.

I also complained about notifications being too long at times and required far too much scrolling before you got to the action buttons, like “Archive” on a Gmail notification. With this new Material 3 Expressive design that is more bubbly, Google seems to have cleaned up this situation and I’ve found dealing with notifications to be much easier on the PW4. I feel like I’ve had far fewer issues or frustrations around notification handling than in previous years.

Google still hasn’t given us a battery life warning at night, though. Watches like the Apple Watch will warn you before bed if it thinks your watch won’t make it through the night on the wrist while tracking sleep. It tells you to charge before bed, and it’s super handy. The Pixel Watch 4 does not do this and I really wish Google would. It seems like such a simple idea to implement. I had at least one or two nights where the watch basically died while I slept because I didn’t check percentage before going to bed.

Haptics. Like last year, I still find them to not be strong enough. I can’t tell you how many notifications I’ve missed over the past few weeks when my phone isn’t handy. I’ve relied on the Pixel Watch 4 to get me info when I need it, yet I often look at my wrist after an extended period of time and am surprised to see 5 or 6 or 10 notifications there that I had no idea were there. Google says they made the haptics stronger this year, but I can’t tell – and yes, I have them cranked to the max.

Satellites! I don’t have anything to report back on this because I didn’t utilize it, but the Pixel Watch 4 has satellite connectivity for those times you lose connectivity and still may need to reach emergency services or loved ones. I didn’t venture into the wild during testing, so I can’t tell you how well this works. Also, you’ll need to own the LTE model in order to have access to satellite SOS. But hey, I’m glad it’s here and you can thank the Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 for that addition.

Pricing. Google gave us the Pixel Watch 4 at the same prices as the Pixel Watch 3. That means $349 (41mm, WiFi) starting prices that top out at $499 (45mm, LTE). It’s a good thing that prices didn’t budge, since Google really isn’t giving us any major upgrades. Sure, the new display is awesome, but not a game changer improvement. We have almost the exact same chip inside that only added satellite connectivity. Battery life is about the same as last year’s models in my testing. Performance is not noticeably better and the fitness tracking is basically identical. There’s nothing in the new Pixel Watch 4 that suggests a price increase was needed, so Google didn’t.

Should you buy a Pixel Watch 4?

This is a solid smartwatch, just like the previous Pixel Watch models were. I love the Fitbit integration, as I truly do believe it’s the best overall tracking experience for most people. The upgraded display has been fun to use and the new software UI looks great on it. Battery life is acceptable for a smartwatch that does a lot during the day and the design remains my favorite of any smartwatch.

Do I have complaints? Sure. I worry about durability, although much less-so this year with new repairability. There are software nitpicks that remain after all these years. This band system is still so silly and overly complex. But overall, the price is fair and you get the Pixel experience, only in watch form. It’s a winner of a watch.