Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsLook elsewhere unless you love charging
Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2022
I'll start with the pros because sadly there aren't many. It feels premium and I personally like the small footprint on my wrist as it's not heavy and is comfortable with the band it ships with. Everything else leaves me wondering why I've stuck with Google this long. Battery life is the main reason I returned this watch. If you don't ever touch it, leave the screen dark, disable every feature you can and leave battery saver on constantly, you'll get at most 20 hours of use per day because the thing can't make it a full 24 hours, even when you aren't wearing it at all! I have to charge 2-3 times per day (twice if I do no exercise at all) and it takes around 1.5-2 hours to charge, which seems excessive given my phone can charge from 0-100% in 28 minutes. When you aren't charging, you have to deal with no spo2 sensor (even though it has one), AFib tracking doesn't work constantly and the speakerphone is ENTIRELY UNUSABLE. It crackles when turned up loud enough to almost hear it and when it isn't crackling it's not loud enough to make out voice. You can't even hear the Assistant talk and the alarm wouldn't be noticeable if not for the vibrating. This watch makes me want to spend thousands to switch back and be an Apple customer after years of leaning towards Google for everything. This watch was a swing and a huge miss. This watch doesn't even compete with 5 year old watches out there. Not sure what Google was thinking, but it's making me reconsider being a Google Fanboy as no other Android watch checks all the boxes. My other complaint is the FitBit Premium membership needed to keep most of your data long-term unless you export it elsewhere (which isn't too difficult). Ultimately this experience pushed me to decide to not use a watch for now and I'm going to quit using Google Fit on my phone as I feel I should be getting paid for them to keep and sell my data to others. My other negative is the impact that this has to the environment. While the manufacturing process already did enough damage, this watch needs so much electricity to stay alive that it will cost me more than the watches value to keep it charged, creating more unnecessary environmental impact and costing me more in electricity daily. I can't even believe that I came to these conclusions because I'm a techie/nerd and usually need all the latest/greatest products.
Would not recommend this subpar watch, most likely will convert me from Googles [clearly] subpar Ecosystem. Even Fitbit Sense (which Google owns) gets at least 6x battery life and has more features, but Google made lots of promises for that watch that they still have yet to deliver - so I'm going without a watch now. Very sad this is what they released as their first watch. Maybe they should have waited yet another year if this is all they could do? Everyone I know that got a Pixel watch returned them and everyone I knew that wanted one no longer does. Pretty sad, but you sure aren't getting what you're paying for here. Google needs to remember who their customers are...
