The Pixel Watch 3 Is Great for Casual Fitness Tracking
The Pixel Watch 3 (starting at $349.99) is Google’s latest smartwatch, the third in its Pixel line and, according to rumor, perhaps the future of smartwatches for Fitbit fans. (Google has denied the rumor that it’s phasing out the Versa or Sense, but if you go to fitbit.com today, you’ll see a giant banner enticing you to order a Pixel 3. Take that for what you will.)
The new Pixel Watch improves on previous Pixel models, featuring a brighter screen and two screen sizes (large wrists rejoice, since one of them is 45 mm). The battery life is better than previous Pixels, with my testing resulting in a longer life than the promised 36 hours. That's a big jump up from the previous model's battery life of 24 hours. You'll still want to charge it daily, but the 36-ish hour battery life means you can do it anytime during the day.
If you’re considering a switch from a Fitbit smartwatch, the Pixel Watch 3 can’t match the nearly week-long battery life you’re used to, but it does have offline maps that don’t require you to bring your phone along. The Pixel 3 also has new fitness-focused features, including running dynamics like ground contact time and vertical oscillation. I also found that its heart rate sensors and GPS are impressively accurate, giving results similar to the Garmin Forerunner I tested alongside it.
Out of the box
The Pixel Watch 3 that I tested was the 41 mm version, the smaller of the two sizes on offer. This is the same size as the Pixel Watch 2, and was a good size for my relatively small wrist. If you prefer a larger watch, the Pixel 3 is also available in a 45 mm size.
The Pixel Watch 3 has two physical buttons: the crown, which can turn or can be pressed as a button, and a second button, located just above the crown if you’re wearing the watch with the crown on the right side. Press the crown to see the menu of available apps (or to return to the watch face); press the button to see recently accessed apps.
The Pixel Watch 3 comes with two silicone wristbands, one smaller and one larger. You’ll need to attach the band yourself. It took me a minute to figure out how, but basically you push in on a button at the side of the wristband slot, and then slide the band in sideways. To remove the band, press that button and the band will slide back out. To wear the watch, you close the band with a peg that goes through one of the holes on the band, and then you tuck the end of the band inside itself. (In other words, it works the same way as the band on the Pixel Watch 2.)
The charger is also like the one that came with the Pixel Watch 2, with four tiny pins that click into place once you have the magnet oriented correctly. Pro tip: the cord of the charger wants to be right next to the crown of the watch. If it’s not aligning, you probably have it pointing in a different direction.
I found the Pixel Watch 3 comfortable to wear; the smooth back didn’t leave an indentation on my skin and the silicone band has nothing to catch on clothes or objects. Some people find a silicone band sweaty, but that didn’t bother me. I did appreciate that I could quickly wash or wipe it down (say, in the shower after a workout) without having to wait for the band to dry.
Display
The Pixel Watch 3 has an AMOLED-style Actua display that Google says features 2,000 nits of brightness, twice as bright as its predecessor. I don’t have a Pixel Watch 2 for a side-by-side comparison, but I can say that the Pixel Watch 3 was easy to read even in bright sunlight, and it dimmed enough to be easy on the eyes in most dark environments.
Google says that the new model has smaller bezels than the Pixel Watch 2, and that its 45-millimeter size has 40% more screen real estate than its predecessor.
The watch has an always-on display (which you can turn off) and it also features tilt-to-wake and tap-to-wake gestures. Note that even when it is “always” on, the display dims when it doesn’t think you’re looking at it. In this dimmer view, details may disappear from the watch face, like the hash marks around the edge of the Adventure face, only to reappear when you snap your wrist toward you to read the time. There’s a brief delay between the gesture and the watch face brightening up, which I didn’t love—and which made it hard to quickly check my stats when running.
The Pixel Watch 3 also boasts the ability to detect when you go to sleep and turn on Bedtime Mode automatically. I found this feature too annoying to test: if I went to bed with the screen still on, it would flash on every time I moved around. I always ended up putting it in Bedtime Mode myself so it would stop doing that.
Battery and charging tests
Google advertises that the Pixel Watch 3 can last up to 36 hours in Battery Saver mode, but surprisingly I found the battery life to be better than that. I tested how long it took to drain from 100% to 0%, both with and without turning on Battery Saver. (Battery saver disables the always-on display and reduces some background activity.)
When I did my tests, I took the watch off the charger in the evening, put it in Bedtime Mode while I slept, and then took it out of Bedtime mode in the morning. During the day, I made sure to use the watch for an hour-long GPS-enabled running workout, and an hour of listening to music over Bluetooth headphones. The watch was still going strong when bedtime rolled around again, so once again I used Bedtime mode, turned it off in the morning, and waited to see how long until the watch fully died. I followed this protocol on two separate occasions, once with the default settings enabled, including the always-on display; and the other with Battery Saver turned on.
Without Battery Saver, I got an impressive 36 hours and 39 minutes.
With Battery Saver, I got a few extra hours—39 hours and 11 minutes.
(Note that these results are for the 41 mm model. The 45 mm has a larger battery, but also a larger display, so the exact battery life may not be the same.)
Battery Saver mode automatically turns on when the watch has 15% of battery left, so I let it do this even on my non-Battery-Saver test (since I was aiming to test the defaults). The watch goes dark when there’s about 3% of battery left. After that, if you click the crown three times, it will briefly show the time along with a dead battery icon.
When charging the Pixel Watch 3 from this apparently dead state, it takes about 20 minutes to get up to 50% battery, and will be fully charged within an hour. (I timed it at 53 minutes to get from 0% to 99%, although at that point it stayed at 99% for several minutes. I’m fine with counting 53 minutes as a full charge.) The watch displays an estimated charging time along with its battery percentage, which was generally pretty accurate. If it says you have 17 minutes left, you probably actually do.
Fitness features
The Pixel Watch 3 is not a purpose-built running watch, but it has the heart rate and GPS sensors to let it do the job, and some features in the Fitbit app that measure running-specific metrics. So I brought the watch along on several runs each week while I was testing it.
My overall impression is that it’s good enough at run tracking, if what you really want is a smartwatch that can track running. Serious runners will be happier with something like a Garmin that has physical buttons and even more accurate location tracking. (The price of the Pixel Watch 3 falls somewhere in between that of the Garmin Forerunner 165 and the Forerunner 265; consider those two models.)
I tested the Pixel Watch 3 alongside a Garmin Forerunner 265, paired to different phones (and I left the Pixel’s phone behind, to be sure I was testing the watch’s performance on its own). For some runs, I wore a heart rate chest strap paired to the Garmin, since that would give me the most accurate heart rate for comparison. Here’s how it went.
Ease of use during running
Overall, the Fitbit app on the Pixel Watch 3 gave a smooth, helpful, accurate experience when running. If you want to know whether the watch is good enough for your runs, you can stop reading here. It does the job.
The display gives a color-coded heart rate meter alongside your total mileage, time, heart rate, and current pace in miles per minute. Swipe for two other helpful screens: to the right are your music controls (for music playing either from your phone or watch), and to the left is a menu where you can lock the screen, add an “interval” (in other words, that’s your lap button), or end or pause the workout.
On a regular easy run, this was great. The heart rate and mileage kept pace with the Garmin on my other wrist, and whenever it buzzed to tell me a mile had elapsed, the distance was never off by more than a few hundredths of a mile.
I also created a custom interval workout in the Fitbit app, to see how easy it was to follow the workout from the watch. Flying colors here, too: there’s even a progress meter on the side of the watch so you can see how far you are through the interval. My only major complaint is that when I looked at the watch, it would take an extra second or two to fully light up the display. That’s too long; a running watch needs to be glanceable when your feet are moving at high speed.
Between the delay in glancing at the watch, and the lack of physical buttons, I wouldn’t recommend this watch for a serious runner who is trying to decide between a Pixel and a Garmin. But for most people, the Pixel will do a perfectly good job of tracking runs.
Accuracy as a running watch
While I think accuracy in fitness trackers is a somewhat overrated concept (you’ll never know exactly how accurate they are, and that’s OK), a running watch needs to be able to track distance and heart rate consistently enough to be useful. The Pixel passed this test, although it’s not quite as reliable as the Garmin I compared it to. For example, here’s how closely the Pixel Watch 3 (left) followed my route, compared to the Forerunner 265.
Yeah, it’s not perfect, but I’ve seen other devices (like an older Apple Watch) follow the wrong road entirely at that intersection, teleporting over once it realizes where I actually am. The Pixel doesn’t fall for that, and gets a passing grade. Here are the stats from that same run, showing that it got the overall mileage and pace correct as well:
Advanced running metrics
Where the running accuracy may sort of break down—it’s honestly not clear—is in the new, advanced running metrics. I do appreciate the way the Fitbit app shows this data, placing your numbers on a spectrum and telling you which end is thought to correspond to a more efficient stride.
On the same run as the one in the screenshots above, the PW3 reported a stride length of 0.88 meters (Garmin: 0.87) and a cadence of 174 steps per minute (Garmin: also 174). Great so far!
But then we have a ground contact time of 302 milliseconds (Garmin: 260), a vertical oscillation of 6 centimeters (Garmin: 7.9), and a vertical ratio of 6.9% (Garmin: 9.1%). These numbers don’t match, and it isn’t clear how you would tell which is correct. That said, there’s not much you can do with these numbers either way. So it doesn’t really matter—which makes their existence kind of moot.
Recovery metrics
Another new group of features has to do with your Readiness, Cardio Load, and the Morning Recap that aims to tell you how your body is doing lately. Here, too, I’ve compared the numbers with the Garmin, as well as an Oura ring, long held to be sort of a gold standard in consumer wearable recovery tracking. (If you’re interested in learning more about how different devices track recovery, I have a comparison of Oura, Whoop, and Garmin here.)
Overall the watch does alright in matching the other devices’ numbers. It captures the same fluctuations in heart rate variability (HRV) as the other two. But its measurements of resting heart rate were consistently higher than the others, reporting heart rates 6 to 10 beats higher. When they gave me a number in the 40’s, the Pixel would report a number in the 50’s.
The readiness metric was also hit-or-miss. Sometimes it tracked with the other devices, and sometimes it went the opposite direction. “Readiness” isn’t a scientific concept, so there’s no way to find out what your true readiness is; the watch just spits out a number and it’s up to you whether you trust it. Fitbit does not give you a breakdown of why your readiness is the number it is (like Oura does) so you’re left guessing.
Third-party running apps don’t always play well
The Pixel Watch 3 is integrated into the Fitbit ecosystem, and Google expects you to use the Fitbit app as the default for tracking workouts including runs. It’s good at that. That said, when I was setting up the watch, it suggested that I choose a few other workout apps; I selected Strava, Couch to 5k, and Alltrails. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a smooth experience with any of them.
What Google doesn’t tell you is that installing an app on your watch is not the same as installing the app on your phone. When I started up the Strava app, it prompted me to log in on my phone, so I had to stand there in the parking lot by the the running trail installing the app before I could sign in. The Couch to 5K app didn’t even prompt me; it guided me through the run without issue, and then I realized afterward that I didn’t have the app on my phone. I installed the app, but at that point there was no way to get the data from the run I had already finished.
(My experience with AllTrails was hilariously frustrating; I selected a nearby trail, then realized as I was running it that the mileage counter was still zero. Either I didn’t run the trail from the right starting point, or the app glitched, or possibly both. I wasn’t even able to force-quit the app.)
The bottom line
Overall, the Pixel Watch 3 functions well as a smartwatch for Android users, and the built-in running features make it a decent running watch, although serious runners will probably prefer a device that’s more dedicated to the task.
Pros
36-hour battery life
Brighter display than its predecessor
Two options for screen size (41 mm and 45 mm)
More fitness metrics, including recovery and running dynamics
Cons
Always-on display has a delay in brightening up when you look at it
Lack of physical buttons, and some inaccuracy in location, mean it won't replace a serious running watch