Earlier this month, we saw a slick looking set of leaked Pixel Watch renders. These images featured two watch faces that leaker Jon Prosser expects to be included in the wearable when it likely emerges next year.
Now these two watch faces have popped up in the official Wear OS 3 emulator, along with eight others which could also be bundled with the Google Pixel Watch. And we're getting a better feel for how the wearable will leverage Google's $2.1 billion Fitbit acquisition.
On a deep dive into the code, 9to5Google discovered a video showing all ten of these watch faces animating. To get things started, here are the two previously picked out by Prosser:
While this suggests that all of the faces included in the emulator could be included in the Pixel Watch, more interesting is what it says about Google’s acquisition of Fitbit. While fitness tracking on smartwatches is hardly groundbreaking at this point, one of the watch faces goes as far as to include the Fitbit logo alongside a running tally of stairs climbed and total calories burned.
A previous Pixel Watch leak claimed that the hardware side of Google’s upcoming wearable would be handled by the Pixel hardware team, but that Fitbit integration was planned from a software side under the codename “Nightlight”, and this seems to back up that assertion.
The site notes that the Fitbit branded watch face wasn’t to be seen in another version of the video found in the same location, and suggests this may mean that Fitbit integration is exclusive to certain regions.
With or without Fitbit branding, steps, heart rate and calories feature heavily on many of the watch faces, but can be displayed in different ways. Below we see a selection of these, from an Apple Watch style activity ring to some built-in complications to passively track activity.
There are also less ‘busy’ watch faces for those who want to keep things simple.
There’s also something a bit more abstract. The arty example included below gradually shifts color as the sun moves across the sky. While you’d assume that relates to the time of day, we can’t say for sure as the time remains static at 9:30 in the clip, like in many of the other examples depicted above.
Hopefully we will see all of these watch faces on our wrists soon. The Pixel Watch is rumored to be coming in early 2022, so presumably not alongside the Pixel 7. However, a joint event with the Pixel 6a remains a possibility.
