Google Convinced Smartwatches of The Future; Do You Agree?

Google Is Convinced That Smartwatches of the future you might want to think twice before buying a Google Pixel Watch, such as Fitbit.

Smartwatches Pixel Fitbit

So why did it take so long for Google to create a smartwatch? When posed with this issue to Google’s Vice President of Hardware and Pixel product manager Rick Osterloh, he responded with a single word: Fitbit. Because it lacked a robust health and fitness platform until very recently, Google could not produce the smartwatch it had envisioned.

Osterloh says, before Google’s official debut of the new Pixel Watch and Pixel 7 phones, “We wanted to develop a watch earlier. We probably would have, too, if we’d had access to the resources we now consider essential to good health. Because of this, Google agreed to purchase the fitness tracker firm in 2019 for $2.1 billion; however, the deal was not finalized until early 2021, so Google could not work on integrating or improving Fitbit’s features prior to the closing of the deal.”

Google Assistant

The pieces fell into place rapidly once Osterloh and his colleagues began collaborating with the Fitbit team. He explains that the idea behind the Pixel Watch was straightforward. ” It’s like providing first-rate advice on health and wellbeing through the Fitbit app, integrating the greatest features of Google and its core apps, and doing all of that in an attractive package. The Pixel Watch is an accessory, a fitness tracker, and an extension of Google Assistant all rolled into one wearable device. Health and fitness apps are “the killer app on watches today,” adds Osterloh.

Smart watch

However, Google intends for the smartwatch to serve as much more than that in the future. The idea of ambient computing in the eyes of Google is one in which all of your gadgets operate in unison to simplify your life. The system relies heavily on a wearable computer that can track your whereabouts, activities, and emotions. A device like the Pixel Watch would comprehend you better than any augmented reality glasses. Google predicts that, eventually, the smartwatch will be as widespread as the smartphone.

There’s a solid reason for that strange sense of déjà vu you’re having right now. So much of this has been told before: the promise of wearable computers and Google’s faith in a more personalized future for computing. Nearly a decade ago, Google had many bold ideas about smartwatches, and those ideas have since been largely justified. While Android-powered wearables mainly flopped, the Apple Watch was a huge success—especially considering that Google never even released its flagship gadget.

Google has recently stated that it is now actively exploring the smartwatch market. Even now, it’s a bold and inspiring plan. On the other hand, Google is famed for abruptly shutting off products it had previously defended strongly. Will people have enough faith in Google to finally invest in its plan? Even so, should they?

A confirmation from Osterloh. This is something he is quite confident in and anxious to demonstrate. As Google prepares to release the seventh generation of the Pixel phone, he hopes he has already achieved this goal in the smartphone industry. He argues that no one challenges Google’s commitment to mobile, but “some of these areas are new for us, and we have to have the same determination in those categories. We certainly plan to.”

Google’s primary goal should be for the Pixel Watch to become the most popular and effective fitness tracker ever created by the company. There’s a chance it might buy Google some time to create the smartwatch it envisions.

Once more, in the future

Google’s initial smartwatch effort showed promise. Android Wear was released as a software platform by Google in early 2014, during a time when the Apple Watch was still only a rumor. Almost immediately, major tech companies said they were developing Android-powered smartwatches, LG, Motorola, Samsung, and others.

At last year’s I/O developer conference, Android’s then-head Sundar Pichai gave a talk about the future of computing and why wearables were a crucial part of it. He believed that Google was in a prime position to “deliver a seamless experience across all your linked devices” since “users increasingly are living in a multiscreen environment.” He outlined four pillars around which Google’s approach to this ecosystem is based: everything is aware of its surroundings, speech is a primary input technique, everything should be seamless, and your phone is the center of the universe.

After that, Android’s then-director of engineering, David Singleton, spent the next 20 minutes detailing how Android Wear would function. The wristwatch, he said, is “a powerful computer small enough to wear comfortably on your body all day long,” and it would provide developers with “exactly the same capabilities we’re used to that because Android is widely used for smartphones and tablets. He showed out three brand-new pieces of technology from Motorola, LG, and Samsung and said there would be many more to come.

Smartwatches OS Devices

For a smartwatch powered by Google, that was its peak moment of popularity. For the next half a decade, Google stuck to the same pattern: ignore the platform for a while, then return with a few upgrades and a promise that the firm still cared about wearables, and then ignore it again. Google rebranded Android Wear as Wear OS and released version 2.0 in the fall of 2018.

By that time, however, Google had shown little commitment to the smartwatch market by releasing few noteworthy new Wear OS devices or significant improvements to existing ones. It appeared like Google had no problem with Samsung’s hardware serving as Apple’s major opponent when the two companies released Wear OS 3 and the Galaxy Watch 4 together in 2021. The management even sounded relieved that anyone wanted to manufacture the equipment.

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The only thing that has changed about Google’s smartwatch strategy is how much Google seems to care about it, which is why all this background information is necessary. Pichai’s beliefs regarding context and seamlessness, as well as the efficacy of voice, remain at the heart of the strategy.

There has been a shift in how Google conceptualizes the phone in your pocket, with the search giant now viewing Assistant and its cloud services as the glue that holds all your gadgets together. However, Google’s predictions about the future of smartwatches were largely accurate nearly ten years ago. Apple has validated Pichai’s hypotheses, but Google doesn’t seem to give a damn.

At some point around 2018, though, Google seems to have a eureka moment: smartwatches have great potential to become the modern computing devices of the future, but they are not yet there. At the moment, at least, smartwatches are primarily used as fitness trackers. For Google to have any shot of dominating the next generation, it must first prove itself in this one. For this reason, it is necessary to transform the Pixel Watch into a high-quality fitness tracker.

A Look at the Fitbit Pixel

Google’s foray into the wristwatch market wasn’t limited to the acquisition of Fitbit. A few months before the purchase, it had agreed to pay $40 million for some smartwatch technologies and members of the Fossil R&D staff. This was so effective that in 2021, Samsung merged its Tizen wearable OS with Google’s Wear OS. It was evident that under Osterloh’s leadership, Google had recommitted to the idea that wearables were important.

Yet, Google’s intentions were only able to progress after the Fitbit agreement. Following the acquisition’s completion, the team wasted no time in getting to work on incorporating the acquired company’s hardware and software into the Pixel Watch. Osterloh describes the pace as “rapid and ferocious.” There were surprisingly many instances in which the two groups complemented one another: Similarly to how Fitbit spent years perfecting its technology for deciphering data from light sensors in its devices, Google’s AI research teams have been hard at work on methods for rectifying and improving the data from similar sensors.

One of the things we did in the creation of this product,” says Osterloh, “was to combine a bunch of work in our Google AI research team with the algorithm work from Fitbit to build a heart-tracking baseline that’s incredibly near to what you get out of a chest strap.” This is because chest straps are typically the best source of on-body biometric data. Osterloh, who claims to have been using Fitbits for ten years straight, has been testing the sensors through their paces while simultaneously donning a Pixel Watch and a chest strap. 

The dual-processor layout of the Pixel Watch is inspired by Fitbit’s design and is made with fitness monitoring in mind. Executive Director of the Android Team Seang Chau explains, “We’ve got the core SoC that’s running Android, but then we have an MCU (short for microcontroller unit), similar to Fitbit, that allows us to perform one-second heart rate measurements, all the time.

” On average, the Apple Watch takes a heart rate reading once every five minutes, whereas Fitbits and the Pixel Watch take readings virtually continually. Our focus on health benefits is made possible by the fact that heart rate is the cornerstone of the fitness data we are extracting.

Pixel Watch’s

In addition, the two groups collaborated to bring the Fitbit app to the Pixel Watch’s compact circular display and link the watch’s back-end data so that a user’s blood oxygen and heart-rate sensors can be immediately synced with their Fitbit account. Fitbit is what keeps track of your heart rate, displays your “sleep score” and “day readiness score” each morning, and provides the full range of exercise and activity data that customers require.

Fitbit was also able to get the necessary tools to compete with Apple’s Watch through this purchase. Many still wear Fitbits, but Apple was already moving on without them, thanks to the App Store and Siri. Fitbit, in order to compete with Apple’s products, needs a hardware team that can design a device with greater capabilities than just measuring exercise. As luck would have it, Google was prepared to do just that.

A wrist computer is still a thing of the present.

Although it may function similarly to a Fitbit in many ways, the Pixel Watch was intended to appear highly different from a Fitbit. It’s designed to be both a fashionable accessory and a reliable training partner, with a broad assortment of interchangeable bands and a round, domed face. Its diameter is significantly less at 41mm than the Apple Watch’s, and the watch itself exudes a more understated vibe. Very refined. Osterloh is fond of the layout. Even if he claims not to have seen the enormous bezels, there is no mistaking the pride with which he examines it. The challenge, he explains, is creating a stunning design within the constraints of the available space.

At the present moment, there is a finite amount of functionality a smartwatch can provide due to battery life and computing constraints. Even though Google put a lot of effort into the Samsung Exynos 9110 chip inside the Pixel Watch (unfortunately, there is no Tensor chip here), the limitations of a watch are still primarily set by the laws of physics.

This is why it’s crucial to get fitness and health right; this is something that smartwatches can already do well before so much else becomes possible. But if you think Google is here for the long run, it’s obvious that they foresee that shifting rapidly.

Smart Devices

To paraphrase what Osterloh has to say about it, According to the author, “I think increasingly, it becomes a more and more independent gadget that will start to take over more of the functions of your phone or even a computer on your wrist.” He raves about how convenient it is to use a smartwatch to manage your smart home, send and receive instant messages, and more.

He admits to being a “talk to your watch on speaker at the grocery store” type, though he is suitably ashamed to admit it. He claims this will make your phone less of a computer and more of an accessory, saying, “It will nearly subsume all the features you have in your phone.”

Because most people don’t want to spend all day tapping on their watches—and the devices can’t handle that anyway—the Pixel Watch’s interface was reworked to display information without trying to get you to interact with it.

With his Pixel Watch, Chau is only alerted to the most urgent messages and appreciates the convenience. His washing machine and dryer are hooked up to the web, so his watch will alert him when the load is dry. Interruptions no longer throw me off, he claims.

Google’s goals

Then, Chau takes the concept even further, hinting at Google’s loftiest goals for its most diminutive gadgets. He says that the information gathered by your smartwatch could affect how you use other gadgets. It takes longer to fall asleep and your heart rate increases every time you use Instagram or TikTok, the ad copy warns.

Perhaps you could make such a claim if you knew the users’ phone activities and tied that to the fitness metrics displayed on the watch. Consumer electronics companies have searched far and wide for novel uses for your information, and a wrist-worn heart rate monitor is a prime illustration of this tendency.

What Google means by “ambient computing” and what Pichai referred to in 2014 is precisely the kind of interconnectedness between devices that Osterloh has been working on since he returned to the firm in 2016 to form a hardware team. The objective remains the same, and conventional strategies are still applicable. Almost everyone, including Apple, supports Google’s goal. Will Google survive this time?  

After years of neglect and months of vigorous denial, Google finally admitted it was canceling Stadia, its game-streaming platform. People are less likely to accept Google’s radical new worldview as the Google Graveyard grows. Osterloh, though, claims that Google is committed to the long run. It’s well-equipped for now, well-prepared for the future, and has a lengthy plan for getting there. At this point, all he can do is cross his fingers and hope he makes a few sales.