At Made by Google 2026, Google has announced the Pixel Watch 5. This Wear OS device is visually identical to last year’s model, but sees a handful of internal hardware upgrades in service of more proactive help and health tracking. However, it’s the software refinements, led by At a Glance, that stand out to me.
The Pixel Watch 5 has the same domed Actua 360 display protected by “custom” 3D Corning Gorilla Glass 5. It’s still a 320 PPI AMOLED LTPO screen with up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness.
The 12.3mm thickness between the 41 and 45mm cases is unchanged from last year, while the batteries are 7-10 mAh larger but do not improve Google’s battery estimate of 30 hours with always-on display on the smaller device and 40 hours on the bigger unit.
That said, the Pixel Watch 5 is now powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 Accelerated chip. This variant has a 12% boost in CPU processing power, while RAM jumps from 2 to 3 GB. These upgrades, along with the dual-chip (M55 co-processor) architecture, make the device 20% faster. Google said that translates to app launch and scrolling improvements, but we didn’t notice anything in our brief hands-on. The Pixel Watch 5 also doubles the storage to 64 GB, with all this helping power new on-device AI features.
