Confession: While I really like testing out new health trackers, I don’t love the method of acclimating to new health trackers—so ones which are intuitive to use proper out of the field are large for me.
I used the Google Pixel Watch with the Google Pixel 7 Pro telephone, and located the connection to be seamless (The Pixel Watch solely works with Google Pixel and Android telephones). The watch syncs together with your contacts, apps, and Google calendar in your telephone, which makes communication between the 2 a breeze. My watch synced straight away with the telephone, and the setup was pain-free.
Once it was prepared to go, I discovered the Google Pixel Watch simple to use: You use swipes and faucets on the touchscreen to maneuver the menus, in addition to the 2 bodily buttons (the bezel, which additionally permits you to scroll, and a low-profile button above it). Swipe to the left or proper, and also you see your most important tiles, which embrace exercise choice, day by day steps, coronary heart charge, sleep, climate, and calendar occasions. You can customise these tiles to your liking. Swipe down and also you get the watch’s settings, and swipe up to scroll by way of your textual content, e mail, name, or different app notifications.
I’m an enormous fan of bodily buttons on smartwatches, and I feel those on the Pixel Watch are significantly helpful. Press the bezel as soon as, and also you get a listing of all of your apps. Press it twice, and also you pull up your Google Wallet, which permits you to make phone-free funds. As for the small button, a single press provides you a listing of your most up-to-date apps, whereas a protracted press brings up Google Assistant—which is voice-activated, and actually useful for instantly getting you precisely the place you need to go. For occasion, after I advised it to textual content my accomplice, it not solely introduced up their contact display screen, however guided me by way of creating and sending a voice-activated textual content.
The Apps
You want two apps to use the Google Pixel Watch: the Watch app and the Fitbit app. Think of the Watch app like the inspiration—I used this throughout setup, and haven’t actually messed round with it since. This is the place you select your watch face, the tiles that’ll show in your watch’s display screen, notification choices, and apps to obtain. The Fitbit app is what I exploit every day: That’s the place you get all of your well being metrics, akin to steps, coronary heart charge, and sleep monitoring. It’s additionally the place you get all of the intel in your exercises.
Exercise Options
Your Google Pixel Watch will monitor up to 40 totally different sorts of exercises, from working to elliptical to CrossFit to weight lifting. At first, you’ll have to swipe by way of your entire checklist to discover the one you need to monitor, however if you happen to usually default to the identical sorts of exercises, you’re in luck: The dwelling train display screen retains tiles of your three most lately used icons entrance and heart for straightforward entry.
I’m a runner, so how a health tracker measures working is necessary to me. I really feel just like the Pixel Watch was satisfactory on this entrance, but it surely might have been higher. On the plus aspect, the working display screen reveals 4 metrics on the primary display screen—which you’ll customise—so you possibly can see all of the majors in a single look. For me, that’s time elapsed, distance, coronary heart charge, and tempo.