Pixel Watch 4

A smartwatch normally assumes a phone is nearby, and a phone assumes a cell tower is nearby. The Pixel Watch 4 drops both assumptions.

Google's Pixel Watch 4 can reach emergency services through a series of geostationary satellites, with no phone in your pocket and no tower in range, which is the part of the watch that matters most on the day you need it and never the rest of the time. The screen is built to the same logic of working in conditions that are not ideal. Google calls it the Actua 360: a domed AMOLED under custom 3D Gorilla Glass 5, climbing to 3000 nits in direct sun and dropping to a single nit for the always-on face at night. Because the panel is LTPO, the refresh rate slides anywhere between 1 and 60 hertz depending on what is being drawn, and that sliding is how a 325 milliamp-hour cell covers 30 hours with the always-on display left running. Charging is quick too: about half in 15 minutes, all of it in 45.

The sensor stack is deep for something this small. Red and infrared readers for blood oxygen, electrical sensors the ECG app runs on, a multi-path optical heart rate sensor, a far-field skin temperature sensor, and a continuous electrodermal sensor watching skin conductance for a stress response. Dual-frequency GPS fixes against GPS, Galileo and Glonass at once, which is what keeps a route honest between tall buildings or under trees. A Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 with a Cortex-M55 co-processor runs Wear OS 6 on 32 GB of onboard storage.

The housing is 100 percent recycled aluminium and the Active Band is fluoroelastomer, in small and large. Ours is the 41 millimetre Wi-Fi model, which is the version that keeps the satellite trick and skips the monthly bill.