The Pixel Watch 5 starts at $399.99, opens for pre-order today and ships on August 20. That is $50 more than the 41mm Pixel Watch 4 and $30 more at 45mm. The case, the domed Actua 360 display and the 3,000 nit brightness ceiling all carry over, and Google still rates the battery at 30 hours on the 41mm and 40 on the 45mm with the screen always on. Inside sits a Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 Accelerated chip with 12 percent more CPU, RAM up from 2GB to 3GB and storage doubled to 64GB, which Google puts at 20 percent faster overall. The headroom buys Gemini running offline, so timers, alarms, brightness, Do Not Disturb, music and workouts all answer with the phone left at home. The stock band moves from fluoroelastomer to HNBR, a nitrile rubber with no PFAS in it.
Blood Pressure Trends and Insulin Resistance Trends are the two features Google put at the front of the launch, and both reach the Pixel Watch 3, the Watch 4 and the Fitbit Air this fall. The insulin tool never touches glucose. It reads how efficiently your body turns food into energy, with no needles and no blood, and reports a monthly trend. Breathing Emergency Detection is new as well, and it works the way Loss of Pulse Detection does. Google also claims the watch maps a route twice as accurately around tall buildings and beats the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and the Garmin Fenix 8 Pro at it. The Stephen Curry edition costs $579, and Google’s marketing already warns the band’s water-repellent coating wears off.