The Google Pixel Watch’s battery life could be disappointing

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Fitbit app teardown hints at 24-hour stamina

Google Pixel Watch
(Image credit: Google)

If there's one issue that still plagues the best smartwatches, it's that their battery lifespans that can be measured in hours rather than days. Given its use of the power-hungry Wear OS platform and a reported 300mAh battery, we didn’t have hugely high hopes for the upcoming Google Pixel Watch on that score, and a new app teardown from 9to5Google seems to suggest these concerns are well founded.

The insights come from the latest build of the Fitbit app, which may seem like an odd place to get intel on the Pixel Watch until you remember that Google announced the $2.1bn purchase of Fitbit for $2.1bn back in 2019. The acquisition completed last year, and we know there are plans for Fitbit software integration with the upcoming wearable, even if the watch itself is being built by Google’s Pixel hardware group. 

This in itself could mean pretty much anything, but elsewhere the app recommends your wearable be charged to at least 30% before turning in. That suggests that a third-full battery is enough to support eight hours of heart-rate tracking, which in turn makes us think that the Pixel Watch will only be good for at most 24 hours on a full battery. 

Yes, that should scale up to over 26 hours of heart-rate analysis on a full charge, but that doesn’t factor in the other battery drain you get when you're awake, like screen use, notifications and exercise tracking, which all take their toll.

Maybe Google has got some special secret sauce to prolong the battery life — there are certainly advantages to making both the hardware and software, after all. But if not, we may see a future Pixel Watch 2 taking a leaf out of Samsung’s book and upping the battery capacity considerably, should a sequel be justified.

Alan Martin
Alan Martin

Freelance contributor Alan has been writing about tech for over a decade, covering phones, drones and everything in between. Previously Deputy Editor of tech site Alphr, his words are found all over the web and in the occasional magazine too. When not weighing up the pros and cons of the latest smartwatch, you'll probably find him tackling his ever-growing games backlog. He also handles all the Wordle coverage on Tom's Guide and has been playing the addictive NYT game for the last several years in an effort to keep his streak forever intact.