Jakarta, News – The Google Pixel Watch is one of our favorite Wear OS devices on the market. The original Google Pixel Watch was widely regarded as an imperfect smartwatch but a decent foundation for Google to build on. Those waiting for Google to announce the Pixel Watch 2 can peruse these leaked specifications while they wait for the big unveiling to take place.
Google Pixel Watch 2: Design and specs
The Pixel Watch 2 replaces the Pixel Watch’s dated Exynos 9110 SoC with a Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 Gen 1. According to the entry the Google Pixel Watch 2 will switch from the Exynos 9110 chip that was used in the previous model. It’ll be replaced by a Qualcomm SW5100 which is thought to be a standard Snapdragon W5 chip.
The biggest improvement, however, is probably the efficiency of the chip. The original Pixel Watch suffered from weak battery life, partly due to the old and inefficient Exynos 9100, announced in 2018 and built on the 10nm process (released in 2017). Not to mention that the chip itself was mostly just a rebadged Exynos 7270 (2016, 14nm) ported to the new lithography process. Both the outdated manufacturing technology and old component designs Samsung included in the SoC contributed to the overall inefficiency of the chip.
Life Safer Battery Pixel Watch 2
The Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 is built on the same Samsung 4nm process as most of the 2021 and 2022 smartphone chips, providing a major efficiency improvement over the old chip. While Qualcomm also reuses a previous chip design and simply ports it to a newer process node (W5 is a 4nm port of the Qualcomm QCM2290 IoT chip), it’s still a much newer and more power-efficient chip. It also supports brand-new low-power states such as Deep Sleep and Hibernation, which should further improve the Pixel Watch 2’s battery life.
Google has opted not to use the W5 Plus variant of the W5 platform. The only practical difference between the plus and non-plus variants of the chip is the presence of Qualcomm’s first-party QCC5100 coprocessor. Google has instead decided to use a custom coprocessor based on an NXP chip, similar to the first-generation Pixel Watch.
Connection Improvements
As speculated before, the Pixel Watch 2 is being developed under two separate codenames — “Eos” is the LTE variant and “Aurora” only supports Wi-Fi. This isn’t a new practice for Google; last year’s Pixel Watch used the codename “r11” for the cellular-enabled model and “r11btwifi” for the variant only supporting Wi-Fi.
The Pixel Watch 2 has three separate model numbers: G4TSL, GC3G8, and GD2WG. While we don’t have complete information regarding its availability in specific regions, the regulatory e-labels now include an entry for India’s BIS regulatory body, which could mean that Google intends to launch the watch there.
Google Pixel Watch 2: Software
At this stage, we know even less about the Pixel Watch 2’s software than we know about its hardware. It’ll surely come with the latest version of Wear OS, potentially the same Wear OS 4 that the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 debuted in July 2023.