Renders of Google's first smartwatch, codenamed "Rohan," have been shared by Jon Prosser, showing that Google plans to adopt a circular design for its flagship wearable watch.
Prosser shared the renders in an episode of his YouTube show "Front Page Tech," in which he claims they were made based on marketing material he had seen from a source within Google. The renders show that the Pixel Watch will adopt a bezel-less, circular design, with no buttons, except for a crown on the right.
The display itself, unlike the Apple Watch, features a completely circular form factor. Internally, the Pixel Watch will feature a heart rate sensor, but it so far remains unknown if it sports more advanced health features such as blood oxygen monitoring on the Apple Watch Series 6.
Like the Apple Watch, which allows users to swap and change bands, Google will offer around 20 band options for the Pixel Watch, according to Prosser.
The watch will presumably run WearOS, Google's operating systems for smartwatches. As for a release, Prosser says the watch will debut "sometime in October" but warns to be cautious given Google's habit of delaying and even canceling products altogether.
In 2019, Google signed a $40 million deal with watchmaker Fossil to take ownership of its smartwatch division. As a result of the deal, Fossil smartwatches joined Google's WearOS family and also spurred widespread speculation that Google intends to make its own-branded smartwatch to compete with the Apple Watch.
Besides changes to make it thinner, lighter, and the screen bigger thanks to smaller bezels, the Apple Watch design has largely remained the same since its launch in 2015. A recent patent has revealed that Apple is researching an Apple Watch design with a display that wraps around the band, where in turn, the watch band becomes an extension of the display itself.
