Confession: Whereas I like testing out new health trackers, I don’t love the method of acclimating to new health trackers—so ones which are intuitive to make use of proper out of the field are big for me.
I used the Google Pixel Watch with the Google Pixel 7 Professional cellphone, and located the connection to be seamless (The Pixel Watch solely works with Google Pixel and Android telephones). The watch syncs along with your contacts, apps, and Google calendar in your cellphone, which makes communication between the 2 a breeze. My watch synced straight away with the cellphone, and the setup was pain-free.
As soon as it was able to go, I discovered the Google Pixel Watch easy to make use of: You employ swipes and faucets on the touchscreen to maneuver the menus, in addition to the 2 bodily buttons (the bezel, which additionally means that you can scroll, and a low-profile button above it). Swipe to the left or proper, and also you see your primary tiles, which embody exercise choice, every day steps, coronary heart charge, sleep, climate, and calendar occasions. You possibly can customise these tiles to your liking. Swipe down and also you get the watch’s settings, and swipe as much as scroll by means of your textual content, e mail, name, or different app notifications.
I’m an enormous fan of bodily buttons on smartwatches, and I believe those on the Pixel Watch are notably helpful. Press the bezel as soon as, and also you get an inventory of all of your apps. Press it twice, and also you pull up your Google Pockets, which lets you make phone-free funds. As for the small button, a single press provides you an inventory of your most up-to-date apps, whereas an extended press brings up Google Assistant—which is voice-activated, and actually useful for instantly getting you precisely the place you wish to go. For example, after I advised it to textual content my associate, it not solely introduced up their contact display screen, however guided me by means of creating and sending a voice-activated textual content.
The Apps
You want two apps to make use of the Google Pixel Watch: the Watch app and the Fitbit app. Consider the Watch app like the inspiration—I used this throughout setup, and haven’t actually messed round with it since. That 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, corresponding to steps, coronary heart charge, and sleep monitoring. It’s additionally the place you get all of the intel in your exercises.
Train Choices
Your Google Pixel Watch will monitor as much as 40 totally different sorts of exercises, from working to elliptical to CrossFit to weight lifting. At first, you’ll must swipe by means of your entire checklist to search out the one you wish to monitor, however if you happen to usually default to the identical sorts of exercises, you’re in luck: The house train display screen retains tiles of your three most not too long ago used icons entrance and heart for straightforward entry.
I’m a runner, so how a health tracker measures working is vital to me. I really feel just like the Pixel Watch was ample 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.