After missing out on last month’s Feature Drop, Google is rolling out a sizable Pixel Watch 4 update this December that adds one-handed gestures.
Joining Raise to Talk (which is getting a new step-by-step tutorial) are a pair of one-handed gestures that let you control a Pixel Watch 4 when your hands are full, starting with Double Pinch. It involves pinching “your index finger and thumb together twice.” This can be used to answer and end calls, pause timers, snooze alarms, take photos, control music, and interact with notifications.
Meanwhile, a quick Wrist Turn gesture — “Turn your wrist out and in” — lets you dismiss incoming calls and close other alerting notifications.
Across Wear OS, Google will show Gesture Hints, including directly over buttons or near the scroll bar. How often these prompts will appear can be customized: Always, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Once. All of this is controlled from Settings > Gestures > Hand gestures, including to just enable one or the other.
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Google today is also improving the quality of message Smart Relies on the Pixel Watch 3 and 4 thanks to a new on-device language model. Based on Gemma (Google’s family of open models), it’s 2x as fast and nearly 3x more efficient in terms of memory usage compared to the previous approach. You should also notice quality improvements.
The most recent Pixel Watch 2 and 3 update, which brought Wear OS 6, arrived in October. The Pixel Watch 4 has not seen an update since launch, while the original model will remain on Wear OS 5.1.
Google and other retailers (Amazon) are discounting the Pixel Watch 4 by $50 this month.
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