I’ve owned and thoroughly liked my Pixel 5 phone. I’ve kept it 2 years and it still works nicely… but battery life was starting to weaken a bit. And basically, I felt like a new phone – Google do the trade-in of the old one and were offering £210 for it, plus a discount on the new Pixel watch.
The 7 is bigger than the 5. I have an armband to run with my 5 – I even ran the marathon with it strapped to my arm. I cannot imagine running with the 7 strapped to my arm. I’d have to have arms like John Cena. In other respects, it’s about the same. I went for 256Gb, which means I can burn 88Gb on offline Wikipedia plus still have a ton of my old Dropbox video content synced. Face unlock, which, sure, why not?
I liked the 5’s fingerprint unlock recess at the rear…but the thumb unlock on the screen of the 7 is completely fine.
The sync of apps and content across was very smooth, But you still have to re-login to the vast majority of apps, of course, so is a bit of a pain.
Battery life – well, it’s not worse. I guess I haven’t been using it normally yet, so hopefully it is in fact rather better than my 2 year old phone, or I’ll feel rather foolish.
So phone – good, fine, can’t be too excited about it. How about the watch?
I’ve never had a smart watch. I haven’t worn a watch really for years and years. I like it! It’s light and comfortable. Nice little screen. I got Strava and Spotify set up easily enough, and I’d forgotten how useful having a timer on your wrist is!
Bluetooth connection was a bit odd. I couldn’t get it connected to my Apeks earphones, I just got lists of MAC addresses. But, then I realized this was really about running – and my trusty old Plantronics Backbeat popped up, no problem.
Strava works nicely. Podcast Addict doesn’t seem to want to install on the watch, although Reddit indicates it’s possible. So to listen to a podcast, I had to fanny around getting it in Spotify, then download to the watch, which seemed a bit mysterious.
Starting my run – headphones connected, check, Strava gps ok, check. Start playing the podcast, check. Ok, skip ads – erm, no. Skipping forward 15s seemed to just make it spaz out and repeat itself. So you can’t play at >1x speed, nor skip forward. Not great.
I also haven’t worked out how to use it for Google Pay/Oyster yet…and it’s a bit fiddly to have to unlock the screen so often, so it’s a toss-up if it’s worth it?
Timsformational 