Enlarge / Official rendering by Evan Blass.
Google has been developing the smartwatch platform for eight years, and no one has ever thought it would be appropriate to support the software platform with Google-branded hardware. Eventually, that might change one day, and this year’s rumors are hotter than ever. The Pixel Watch may finally be here.
The latest news is that respectable leaker Evan Blass has made an official rendering of the watch body. Blass’ leak is consistent with an earlier image from Front Page Tech. An Insider report late last year also suggested that the Pixel Watch could launch as early as spring, and 9to5Google recently discovered that Google has added a “Watches” section to the Google Store. It looks like we might hear about this watch at Google I/O 2022.
Enlarge / One of the home tech leaks. This claims to be an image made by Google, not a recreated rendering.
We know almost nothing about the watch, other than that it’s codenamed “Rohan” and will be released with Google’s new version of Wear OS. A serious problem with Wear OS over the years has been the lack of a capable smartwatch SoC, so any chip that eventually makes its way to the Pixel Watch will be big news. Apple has an in-house chip design company that can reliably provide the Apple Watch with yearly battery life and processing improvements. A big part of the reason Wear OS can’t compete is that Qualcomm didn’t take the smartwatch market seriously and spent years selling the same basic chip to manufacturers without any improvement in performance.
Google and Samsung are joining forces to try and revive Wear OS, and while Google is handing in a new version of the OS, Samsung’s big contribution is a competent, modern 5nm smartwatch SoC in the Galaxy Watch 4. Google and Samsung have also teamed up to make the Google Tensor SoC in the Pixel 6. With the two companies working so closely lately, will the Pixel Watch get a Samsung chip? This will be a huge win for the platform.
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Another option is Qualcomm. Qualcomm’s current smartwatch chip is the Snapdragon Wear 4100, a 12nm chip coming out in 2020. The company is working on a “Wear 5100” watch that will launch later this year, but a recent report from WinFuture said the chip is switching from 5nm to 4nm, and it sounds like it’s still months before the chip is ready to ship time. Google is no stranger to announcing products a few months later at I/O, so it could get around that by saying the watch will launch “later this year” without a specific date.
Enlarge / Another Google-made watch leak.
Rumors of a Pixel smartwatch date back to the launch of the Pixel brand in 2016. Part of the reason the Google Watch has taken so long is that Google has tried the idea before and failed, according to reports. A 2019 Insider report said that Google was working on a Pixel Watch to accompany the first phone, but the product was shot down by Rick Osterloh, Google’s senior vice president of hardware. Everyone can guess what these watches are: LG Watch Style and LG Watch Sport. Both shipped in 2017 with the dubious slogan on the box — “Designed with our friends at Google” — which could also announce to the world: “This is a canceled Pixel Watch.”
The Insider report cites an anonymous employee to explain why the watches were not selected:
When evaluating whether to launch the pair of LG-made smartwatches, the aesthetics of the device were Osterloh’s main focus.
“It doesn’t look like something that belongs to the Pixel family,” said a former employee who worked on the project. “We don’t want peripherals to discredit Google’s hardware brand.”
The paragraph basically says that the LG Watch Style and LG Watch Sport are too ugly to be Pixel devices, so it’s interesting to see that the current leak looks like a more modern version of the LG Watch Style’s design.
As usual, Google I/O is shaping up to be an interesting show. We’ll likely hear more about the watch at the virtual event on May 11.
