Pixel Watch 5 hands-on: Health, GPS and AI at the forefront

This year’s Google smartwatch brings some innovations and some overdue features.

Google entered a new category with the Fitbit Air earlier this year, delivering a comprehensive set of tools in a fresh form factor, so it's hard to get too excited about the Pixel Watch 5. After all, the Pixel Watch 4 was already a pretty solid, well-rounded smartwatch that seemed to have found its niche. And from just a glance, the latest Pixel Watch seems like an iterative update, especially considering what few hardware updates there are this year. But with some genuinely intriguing improvements like on-device Gemini for offline use, a big promise on GPS-tracking and a continued focus on durability and longevity, the Pixel Watch 5 might just deliver enough to justify its $50 price hike. At least, that's how I felt after my afternoon at a hands-on event with some sample devices.

Starting at $399.99, the Pixel Watch 5 is available for pre-order today and will ship from Aug 20. It looks very familiar, but has some interesting features that might make life easier for fitness fanatics and the health-conscious.

Some of the changes this year aren't immediately visible, like improvements brought about by the new CPU. Google said that the new Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 Accelerated chip brings about a 12 percent boost in processing power and, when paired with a 50 percent increase in RAM, the Pixel Watch 5 supposedly performs about 20 percent faster than its predecessor.

On the more functional side of things, there are quite a few updates worth calling out. Offline Gemini support is one of my favorite additions, even though I think it's slightly overdue. This allows you to set timers or start workouts by telling the assistant to do so, and because the processing happens on device, it's noticeably faster.

A Google representative long pressed a button on the side of the Watch 5 and asked Gemini to start a timer, and I did the same on my Apple Watch Series 11. I was impressed at how the Pixel was marginally quicker to respond than Siri on the Apple Watch.

Every fraction of a second counts when you have to hold up your wrist to wait for something to happen, so it's nice to see Google focus on speed improvements. But other updates to the Pixel Watch 5 may also help make it easier to find and do stuff, like the 11 new complication styles and proactive intelligence chips. The latter are reminiscent of the Smart Stack hints from Apple's watchOS, which surface small bubbles at the bottom of the watch face with suggested actions based on your habits. For instance, my Apple Watch Series 11 displays a workout hint every morning that would help me log my daily cross-training workout.

According to Google, the proactive intelligence system (previously known as "Magic Cue" on Pixel phones) can bring up things like your flight details and boarding pass or show you how many stops there are left on your bus ride. And when you receive a message from a friend wanting to, say, schedule a meeting or hangout, the proactive intelligence can bring up a button to open your calendar so you can quickly confirm your availability on the specified date. Gemini can also, of course, suggest an answer with the details pre-filled because it knows your schedule (if you grant it access).