The Pixel Watch 5 is here, but it probably shouldn’t be – just yet, anyway.
Google’s latest smartwatch has finally launched in the UK, US and beyond, bringing with it a familiar design, familiar hardware and the promise of several genuinely useful new features.
The problem? Most of those features aren’t actually available yet, making the Pixel Watch 5 feel like a placeholder for the smartwatch Google actually wants to – and will – sell in a few months’ time.
The Pixel Watch 5 is here, but most new features aren’t
The Google Pixel Watch 5 is finally available to buy in the UK, US and most other regions around the world – but it’s not really ready yet.
At the Made By Google event earlier this month, the company outlined key new features coming to the wearable. These include sleep breathing quality monitoring, which helps track your breathing quality while you sleep, improved exercise tracking with support for weight workout plans and HIIT, blood pressure and insulin trends, and even the ability for the watch to detect whether you’ve stopped breathing and call emergency services on your behalf.
These are all more important than usual because, in terms of hardware, the Pixel Watch 5 is almost identical to the Pixel Watch 4. It has the same design, the same weight and thickness, the same screen with the same peak brightness and even the same battery.
The only tangible difference in hardware comes from the processor itself – but even the jump from the Watch 4’s Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 to the Watch 5’s Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 Accelerated isn’t that dramatic.
Google itself only claims around 20% improved performance year-over-year, and even with the accelerated version under the hood, it’s still not quite as powerful as the Snapdragon Wear Elite found in the similarly priced Samsung Galaxy Watch 9.
What I’m trying to say is that Google is relying entirely on software smarts to entice fans to the Pixel Watch 5 instead of the near-identical, and much cheaper, year-old Pixel Watch 4 – which makes the fact that most of the features are MIA at launch all the harder to accept.
A staggered, rather confusing rollout
Rather than booting up your new Pixel Watch 5 and having all features available to you, it depends on whether it’s available – and even if it is, it might not be available in your territory.
Take one of the headline features of the Watch 5 as an example. The breathing emergency detection feature is available at launch in select countries in the EU, including France, Spain, Germany and others, along with the UK – but not in the US, as it didn’t get regulatory approval in time for the wearable’s launch. As such, there’s no hard timeline for when the feature will become available to those in the States.
Then there are features like the improved weight workout plan support and sleep breathing quality monitoring that are on the way to all users, but not until sometime in September. It’s a similar story with blood pressure and insulin trends; the feature will roll out in September, but as it needs a full month of data, the first reports won’t arrive until the end of October.
And without most of those key features on the watch from day one, it feels almost identical to the Pixel Watch 4 experience – except it now costs more money, because, of course it does.
A hard pill for Google’s biggest fans to swallow
It makes my job as a tech reviewer all the more difficult, as I can only evaluate what’s here today, not what might appear a little further down the road.
It’s not like we can take companies’ promises at face value either; Apple promised AI smarts with the iPhone 16, including a redesigned Siri experience, but the latter is only launching in the next few weeks, likely alongside the iPhone 18 Pro, two years later. And we wouldn’t be doing our jobs properly if we recommended products based on features we’ve not seen or tested, which in part contributed to me giving the Pixel Watch 5 four stars instead of something closer to five.
But really, it’s the die-hard Google fans who rush out to pre-order Google’s latest tech that really get the worst deal. These people could wait a few months for the prices to start dropping, but no, they want the best Pixel Watch experience possible, as soon as possible, and they’re willing to drop money before even reviews are available to guarantee that.
And after all that, they’ll boot up the Watch and struggle to spot anything that’s actually new – and it’s because right now, there just isn’t. For all intents and purposes, it’s the same Pixel Watch experience we’ve seen for a year, just with a few minor UI changes and promises that things will get better in the coming months.
Well, if that really is the case, why not just delay the Pixel Watch by a month or two until it’s actually ready?
Just wait until it’s actually ready to go
I can’t help but feel that Google would’ve had a much warmer reception to its Pixel Watch 5 if it had simply delayed it by a month or two until all the new features were ready, present and accounted for.
It’s not like Google hasn’t had long gaps between announcement and release before; the Pixel Watch 4 was announced in August 2025, but didn’t materialise on shelves until two months later, in October 2025.
Of course, we all know the real reason why. It’s the same reason why it shifted from its original October release schedule to August: to get ahead of Apple’s yearly iPhone launch, which takes place in early September.
If Google delayed the Pixel Watch 5 until October, it’d risk it essentially getting forgotten about in the noise of whatever Apple is set to launch in September, not only in terms of wearables like the Apple Watch Series 12, but also in general excitement around the next-gen iPhones – especially if the long-rumoured foldable materialises, as expected.
So, instead, Google has stuck to its guns to cash in on early interest, even though that has seemingly come at the expense of early adopters who now have to wait a few months before really getting the Pixel Watch 5 experience promised at launch. Bad move there, guys.
