You guys know an Apple Watch SE is $250, right? —

The Pixel Watch is official: $349, good looks, and a four-year-old SoC

Google prices itself way above Apple and Samsung, with slower hardware.

Google is clawing its way back into wearable relevance. Today the company took the wraps off what is officially its first self-branded smartwatch: the Pixel Watch. Google started revamping its wearable platform, Wear OS, in partnership with Samsung. While Wear OS 3, the new version of Google's wearable platform, technically launched with the Galaxy Watch 4 last year, this is the first time we'll be seeing an unskinned version on a real device.

First up: prices. Google is asking a lot here, with the Wi-Fi model going for $349 and the LTE version clocking in at $399. The Galaxy Watch 4, which has a better SoC, and the Apple Watch SE, which has a way, way better SoC, both start at $250. Google is creating an uphill battle for itself with this pricing.

Google and Samsung's partnership means the Pixel Watch is running a Samsung Exynos 9110 SoC, with a cheap Cortex M33 co-processor tacked on for low-power watch face updates and 24/7 stat tracking. This SoC is a 10 nm chip with two Cortex A53 cores and an Arm Mali T720 MP1 GPU. If you can't tell from those specs, this is a chip from 2018 that was first used in the original Samsung Galaxy Watch. For whatever reason, Google couldn't get Samsung's new chip from the Galaxy Watch 4, an Exynos W920 (a big upgrade at 5 nm, dual Cortex A55s, and a Mali-G68 MP2 GPU). It's hard to understand why this is so expensive.

Bezel complaints are back! It's been too long.
Bezel complaints are back! It's been too long.
Google

The display is a circle about 1.2 inches across. There's no official size rating from Google. Some places have it listed at 1.6-inches, but that's the diagonal dimension if this were a square display. The only official display spec is that it's 320 ppi. The only size available is 41 mm, the cover is Gorilla Glass 5, and the body is stainless steel in silver, black, or gold. It has 2GB of RAM, 32GB of eMMC storage, NFC, GPS, only 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 802.11n support (Wi-Fi 4), and a 294 mAh battery. For sensors, you get SPO2 blood oxygen, heart rate, and an ECG sensor. It's water-resistant to 5 ATM, which means you're good for submersion, hand washing, and most normal water exposure. Usually 10 ATM is preferred for serious sports swimming, but the Apple Watch is 5 ATM, and Apple does all sorts of swimming promos.

Google's black UI background does a good job of hiding exactly how large the display is in relation to the body, but a few screenshots reveal just how big the bezels are around this thing. They are big. Real big. Like, hard-to-imagine-we're-still-doing-this-in-2022 big.

Proprietary bands and some options aren’t ready for launch

While the watch doesn't come in sizes, the watch bands do, with a "large" (for wrists 162-210 mm around) and "small" (130-175 mm) designation. The watch comes standard with a rubberized "Active" watch band, and you'll get both band sizes in the box.

The Pixel Watch has proprietary watch bands, which isn't great. Apple gets away with doing this because it's Apple, and Apple can spin up a hardware partner ecosystem in its sleep. The Pixel Watch might only have Google's options available, ever, depending on how sales go. The company did not mention any partners for launch. The watch bands click right into the body, though, allowing you to have a band that includes traditional lugs, or bands that go right up to the body.

Channel Ars Technica