As I was running through my month-to-month recap of life with the Pixel Watch last year, I wrote up a list of software changes I would love to see to help bring the watch closer to the other top smartwatches on the market, like the Apple Watch. So far, Google hasn’t implemented any of the four suggestions I had, but a new discovery hints at one of them potentially on the horizon.
You know when you leave your Pixel Watch or Pixel Watch 2 on the charger and walk away for some time, often forgetting it is left charging because it takes so damn long to charge and then realizing hours later that it is likely charged and ready to be worn again? That series of events could be limited if Google did the most obvious thing – send a notification to your phone that your watch is done charging.
You might be thinking, “Haha, Kellen, that’s funny because there is no way the Pixel Watch doesn’t already do that.” Friends, it doesn’t. As obvious of a feature as this is, Google has yet to publicly implement fully charged battery notifications from watch to phone. Insane, I know.
The folks behind the Google News Telegram channel discovered that this feature is likely on the way, as it appeared in the latest Pixel Watch v2.1 companion app update as a behind-the-scenes option. They were able to enable it and show off what the notification (“Pixel Watch fully charged – Your watch is at 100%”) would look like if your Pixel Watch was fully charged and pinged your phone.
Since the feature is a flag that needed to be enabled, we have no idea if Google is about to activate this or not. It could be included in a December Pixel Feature drop, assuming that’s still coming, but that’s a guess on my part. To be honest, this should have been a feature from day 1, not something added on later as a cool new idea. This is smartwatch 101 level stuff.
Should this feature go live, we’ll be sure to let you know. Also, yes, I’m taking my sweet time in getting you my Pixel Watch 2 review – expect it this week. And yes, as you can tell from the image up top, I scratched the screen already. Meh.
