Pixel Watch 4 Enhances User Experience with Innovative Gestures and Smarter Replies
Google has unveiled a significant update for the Pixel Watch 4 this December, introducing intuitive one-handed gestures designed to enhance user interaction, especially when multitasking.
The Double Pinch gesture allows users to control various functions by pinching their index finger and thumb together twice. This action enables scrolling through notifications, sending the first Smart Reply, pausing timers and stopwatches, snoozing alarms, and playing or pausing music. An upcoming update will extend this functionality to answering and ending calls.
Additionally, the Wrist Turn gesture lets users dismiss incoming calls and close alerting notifications by quickly turning their wrist away and back.
To assist users in adopting these gestures, Google has introduced Gesture Hints that appear over buttons or near the scroll bar. Users can customize the frequency of these prompts—choosing from Always, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Once—via Settings > Gestures > Hand gestures. Both gestures are enabled by default.
Beyond gestures, Google has enhanced the Smart Reply feature on the Pixel Watch 3 and 4 by integrating a new on-device language model based on Gemma, Google’s family of open models. This advancement doubles the speed and nearly triples memory efficiency compared to the previous approach, resulting in more responsive and accurate Smart Replies, particularly when the watch is not connected to a phone.
This update follows the October release of Wear OS 6 for the Pixel Watch 2 and 3. The Pixel Watch 4 had not received an update since its launch, while the original model remains on Wear OS 5.1.
In conjunction with this update, Google and other retailers, including Amazon, are offering a $50 discount on the Pixel Watch 4 throughout December.
