Google Pixel Watch 3 review – a big redesign with a deeper focus on health

Google Pixel Watch 3: One-minute review

If you just look at the Google Pixel Watch 3 in its 41-millimeter size you'd likely call it sleek, modern, and beautiful, although you might not expect there to be much that's new over the previous generation, because Google has stuck with a successful design that lets its wearable stick out from the crowd.

What is new is that the Pixel Watch 3 is now available in two sizes, the 41mm of its predecessors and a new 45mm option. Both sizes sport the classic polished-pebble look and feel comfortable on the wrist. It's a nearly perfect design, aside from the sometimes clunky to-use band mechanism on the back.

Both displays are bigger, even on the smaller 41mm watch, which lets you do a lot more from your wrist. They're also easier to use outdoors thanks to a higher maximum brightness, and wearOS has been optimized to let you take advantage of the larger screens.

It's still as responsive as ever, thanks to a Qualcomm processor that keeps things ticking along. The sensor stack on the back is accurate for workout tracking and other metrics, and a slew of new Fitbit features are on board. 

You can read my full thoughts on the Pixel Watch 3 below, but for now I can tell you that it's one of the best-looking smartwatches around, and delivers mostly excellent performance (one of my few issues is the lackluster battery life of the 41mm model), making it a great pick for folks with a Google Pixel or one of the other best Android phones.

Google Pixel Watch 3: Specifications

Google Pixel Watch 3: Price and Availability

With there being two sizes of the Pixel Watch 3 this year, pricing is a bit more complex than in years past. The 41mm Pixel Watch 3 with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi is priced at $349 / £349 / AU$579 – that's the same price as the Pixel Watch 2 in the US and UK, but a bit more in Australia – while you’ll pay $449 / £449 / AU$749 for cellular connectivity. The 45mm Pixel Watch 3 will start at $399 / £399 / AU$669, and jump to $499 / £499 / AU$839 for the advanced connectivity.

Both sizes come in Matte Black or Polished Silver; the 41mm is also available in Champagne Gold, and the 45mm in Matte Hazel. Whichever size and model you go for you’ll also get six months of Fitbit Premium for free. All variants of the Pixel Watch 3 are up for preorder now, with a shipping and on-sale date of September 10.

Google Pixel Watch 3: Design

• Two sizes is better than one
• Still one of the best looking smartwatches around
• Band mechanism for attaching and detaching is less than ideal

With the Pixel Watch 3, Google is mostly staying on course when it comes to design – it’s still an exceptional-looking piece of tech, but now available in two sizes. It still comes in a familiar 41mm option, though looks are a bit deceiving here, and a larger 45mm variant. I spent time with both at the August 13 Made by Google event, and I’ve been living for about three weeks with the smaller 41mm Pixel Watch 3; and I have to say I love the design. 

One of the things I love is that the display here is slightly larger than the Pixel Watch 2 thanks to the bezels being shrunk by 16%; the result is more usable space so you can see more of a message and ultimately have more touch points to get stuff done. It’s also easier to make information out, be it a notification or an extended forecast, as the Actua Display can hit 2,000 nits. It’s on an adaptive brightness setting by default, and while it’s harder to see a difference indoors, when you step outside it gets way brighter. 

My colleague and TechRadar’s Editor-at-Large, Lance Ulanoff, has been testing the larger 45-millimeter Pixel Watch 3. It’s not just a bigger smartwatch; it has a gloriously expansive screen that makes the most of the raindrop design. It’s fun to look at, and feels responsive and roomy to the touch. It’s probably the first big-screen smartwatch that isn’t a pain to wear, because the focus is on the display and not unnecessary hardware embellishments around it.

One of my favorite things is that the polished-pebble-like build of the Pixel Watch is still being used in the third generation here. The larger displays on both sizes feel lik they're molded onto the recycled aluminum bottom. Google’s digital crown, which was redesigned on the last generation, is still on the right-hand center alongside a button. It feels responsive and is an easy way, in conjunction with touch, to navigate wearOS. 

The rear of the Pixel Watch 3 contains the sensor array, which makes activity and workout tracking a reality, but also other health features like heart-rate and sleep tracking, ECGs, and stress monitoring. 

If you’re coming from a Pixel Watch 1 or 2, your bands will work here as Google is sticking with the same band attachment system. If you're switching from another brand of watch though, the system can be a bit challenging – it’s a press-in and a pull to either attach or detach. Once you get the hang of it, that process can be quick, but it took me more than a few tries. 

The band mechanism aside, I really like the look of the Pixel Watch 3, as the focus isn’t necessarily on extra buttons or extraneous design. It’s all about whatever you have on the display, with no raised bezel around the circular OLED on either the 41mm or 45mm. It’s also not super-thick and rests nicely on the wrist, to the point where I think most folks will be fine wearing this overnight for sleep tracking. 

The addition of a larger display on Google’s part likely makes a good chunk of users happy as well, and if you thought the Pixel Watch was too small, well, that’s simply not the case anymore. 

• Design score: 4.5/5

Google Pixel Watch 3: Features

• A simple wearOS experience with deep Google integrations
• Tiles make it easy to get bite-sized pieces of information
• Optimizations to the interface make better use of the larger screens

Unless you get the bigger, 45-millimeter Pixel Watch 3, you likely won’t notice any major changes at first glance, and that’s because a lot of the new stuff is found under the hood or within wearOS. No, the Pixel Watch 3 isn’t powered by a custom Google-made Tensor chip like the Google Pixel 9 or forthcoming Pixel Buds Pro 2, but it does feel, act, and perform like a modern smartwatch.

The experience feels as smooth as using an Apple Watch, the Pixel Watch 2 before it, and even the Galaxy Watch 7 or Galaxy Watch Ultra without a bunch of Samsung pre-loaded apps. A Qualcomm cortex chip is still powering things here, and everything about the Pixel Watch 3 – save for battery life on the 41mm model – is zippy and responsive. 

Applications open quickly and without any perceptible lag; you can quickly adjust or customize watch faces, engaging Google Pay is prompt, and you can start a workout without a hitch. 

To take advantage of a larger display on the 41mm size and the new 45mm size, Google updated the user interface of wearOS itself and some applications. I think we can all agree that Weather is a popular app on the wrist that you might tap into from a widget built into the watch face or ask Google Assistant for. Here, you get a bit more detail shown within the app – there's a graphic depicting the conditions and the current temperature (and highs or lows), but on the 45mm an extended forecast is right below, while on the 41mm it’s a slight scroll away.  

When you open Workouts, you’ll see more rows for types of workouts on both sizes. When viewing messages or emails, more text is visible, giving you a better sense of the message. Little things like that not only make wearOS feel a bit more polished, but potentially let you accomplish more, faster. 

If you use Google's Nest ecosystem, that app has had a pretty major upgrade, as you can see a live view from a connected cam or doorbell right on your wrist. It’s pretty handy, and I also liked being able to quickly adjust the temperature on a Nest thermostat. 

As with the Pixel Watch 1 or 2, you don’t need to push the crown in and go to the app library to find a specific app. You can swipe across the watch face, either left or right, to access tiles for bite-sized information, be that your step count, the weather, messages, or to a start workout. It all feels really responsive, though I find myself hanging around on the new 'Active' watch face, which is colorful and very customizable. 

wearOS optimizations aside, a lot of what else is new lives within Health and Activity. The Pixel Watch 3 feels more like a Fitbit than ever before, and adding to that feeling is the fact that you get six months of Fitbit Premium for free with your new watch (after that it’s $9.99 / £7.99 / AU$15.49 a month). You can still track daily activity like steps, calories, and exercise minutes, but the Pixel Watch 3 can also track heart rate, monitor stress, and take an ECG (electrocardiogram), among other health features.

Similar to the Readiness score on a Garmin watch, Google's new Morning Brief feature greets you when you wake up, showing you your readiness and sleep scores. As you scroll down, it also highlights any important notifications that came through overnight and shows you the weather. It’s a nice way to start the day, and feels like your Pixel Watch is trying to say "good morning". 

Another way that Google’s looking to take on Garmin is a suite of running features—you’ll be able to build a custom workout on your wrist, taking advantage of two metrics: Cardio Load and Target Load. Both of these use custom Fitbit and Google algorithms and your previous activity and Readiness Score to help add extra content and ultimately make a recommendation for you. 

Best of all, though, these aren’t behind the Fitbit Premium paywall. AI-powered Daily Run recommendations and classes will be behind that wall, though as mentioned you do get six months to try them out. 

The Pixel Watch 3 builds on a comprehensive feature set that the second-generation and first ushered in, but continues optimizing the experience, and tosses some new tricks. However, I think the watch's best trick is still that you can use the Camera app on the watch to make composing group shots with you in them easy, calling up a watch-sized preview of your Pixel phone camera's viewfinder image (with your phone propped up or held by someone else) so that you can line everyone up. For me it's more authentic than the Pixel 9 phone's new AI-powered Add Me tool, which creates a composite image out of two photos to let you insert yourself into group pics.

• Features score: 4/5

Google Pixel Watch 3: Performance

• Fast, smooth performance on the wrist
• Battery life on the smaller Pixel Watch 3 could be better

Much of the Pixel Watch 3 experience – nearly all of it, really – is great. It gets the job done as a wearOS smartwatch, and could likely compete with the Galaxy Watch 7 or Apple Watch Series 9. It feels responsive in everyday use for productivity tasks, and does a good job of tracking workouts. 

I completed an outdoor walk, rode an indoor cycle, meditated, and tracked yoga, and I found that the Pixel Watch 3 delivered accurate results in terms of active time, exercise minutes, and heart rate compared with the Apple Watch Ultra 2 or the Galaxy Watch 7. Like both of those, the Pixel Watch has dual-band GPS for more accurate tracking when you're outdoors. 

Tiles are still a very fast, responsive way to get things done on the Pixel Watch. I didn’t encounter any noticeable bugs, and I imagine that as software updates roll out the Pixel Watch 3 might get even more responsive, as has been the case with Google's wearables in the past.

My one area of disappointment is battery life, specifically on the 41mm watch. Google promises 24 hours of battery life on both sizes but, as you might suspect, two sizes offer two different tales when it comes to battery life, because the bigger watch can fit a bigger battery inside.

With the 41mm model – and keep in mind that the always-on display is enabled by default – I got about a day of use, but I needed to recharge it either first thing in the morning or, if I wanted to wear the watch to track my sleep, before bed, depending on the battery level. From what I could tell, it uses about 20% of battery overnight for sleep tracking, which makes sense considering that the rear sensor stack is running.

Of course, a larger smartwatch means room for a larger battery, and the 45mm Pixel Watch 3 doesn't disappoint on this front. It easily lasts close to two days on a full charge, and that’s even with the always-on display working 24/7 (and if you sleep with it on, as Lance has).

So if you have a Pixel Watch 1 or 2, can handle a larger size, and have been asking for better battery life, the 45mm Pixel Watch is likely the way to go, and that’s the main difference – aside from size – between the too. Otherwise, both are plenty responsive. 

• Performance score: 4/5

Google Pixel Watch 3: Scorecard

Google Pixel Watch 2: Should I buy?

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Don't buy it if...

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Google Pixel Watch 3: How I Tested

I've been rocking the 41mm Google Pixel Watch for about three weeks, using it in conjunction with a Google Pixel 9 Pro. After I unboxed the Pixel Watch, I quickly paired with it the 9 Pro and left it on the charger until it reached 100%. I wore it daily, sometimes on its own or sometimes with an Apple Watch Ultra 2 or Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 for comparison.

I put it through its paces using a variety of apps, including pre-loaded ones and others that I downloaded via Google Play. I also used various tiles to get a feel for the enhancements, and tested out the new watch faces.

For workouts, I tried several – including multiple a day – with the Pixel Watch including walking, yoga, strength, meditation, and indoor cycling. I compared the results with other smartwatches and wearables, like the Oura Ring. 

To test battery life, I marked where I was at various points of the day and when I needed to recharge in order to be able to use the Pixel Watch 3 for sleep tracking overnight.