At its Made by Google event on Wednesday, Google unveiled the Pixel Watch 5, a redesigned smartwatch that blends an enhanced Gemini assistant with new health and fitness monitoring. The 41mm model starts at $399 and the 44mm at $429. Preorders opened on Wednesday and Google said the watch will be available on August 20.
Google says the watch surfaces contextually relevant information as soon as it is needed. Users can raise their wrist to ask Gemini questions and receive proactive suggestions, such as finding a nearby lunch spot from a text message. Gemini can also handle navigation requests and will work offline for timers, alarms, and workouts using voice commands.
The watch displays timely updates at the bottom of the watch face, including flight information and ETAs. Google highlighted improvements in general performance, saying the Pixel Watch 5 uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 platform with 12 percent more CPU performance and 50 percent more RAM than the previous platform. The company said the result is roughly 20 percent faster overall performance and up to 40 hours of battery life. New finishes include Canyon Fog and Olive.
Health And Fitness Advances
Google also introduced Health Guardian, a suite of proactive health and safety tools built into the Pixel Watch 5. The company said the watch uses sensors and machine learning to track blood pressure patterns before they produce strain on the heart. Google reported that its waveform model was trained on more than one billion minutes of data from over 500,000 people and tested against 24 hour blood pressure monitors.
The Pixel Watch 5 adds an insulin resistance feature designed to detect changes in metabolic health that may signal increased risk for prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Google said the feature combines signals from sleep, heart rate, physical activity and other health data. A large sensor model then analyzes these signals over time and the company will provide users with a monthly summary of blood pressure and insulin resistance trends.
The watch can detect a persistent drop in oxygen saturation and contact emergency services if it determines a breathing emergency may be occurring. Google said that oxygen emergency contact capability will launch first in select European countries before broader expansion.
Google described additional sleep and fitness upgrades. Sleep stage tracking is about 15 percent more accurate and a new bedtime watch face reduces nighttime distractions. A Smart Wake feature aims to wake users at an optimal point in their sleep cycle and a sleep breathing quality metric tracks minute by minute changes in blood oxygen. For workouts, Google said GPS route mapping is twice as accurate as previous generations for tighter route matching and more precise workout data.
