Google is finally having their own iPhone 4 moment. The search company, notorious for leaking a lot of their products on their own on purpose is finding themselves in the position of a true leak. A report from Ars Technica reveals that an upcoming Pixel Watch was lost at a restaurant, with a full slate of photos appearing on Android Central. Ron Amadeo has more.
Sadly, the device doesn't actually work. No one knows how to charge it, and it might be remotely wiped anyway. Keep in mind that these are pictures of a prototype, not the final model, and this watch was sitting in the lost and found for "several weeks" before the Internet got ahold of it.
Ars Technica
We do get a good look at the hardware, though. Google's smartwatch is a plump little glass circle. The top glass cover is the widest part of the watch circle and seems designed to look like the top "half" of the watch. It actually only makes up about one-third of the watch depth, which makes the watch seem thinner than it is.
One of the hardest things to do as a tech company is test products before their release. Yes, you can keep things in a lab and in a controlled environment, but that does not yield real world results. Case in point: Apple's abysmal maps overhaul in 2012. Apple overconfidently released a mapping product that to this day, a decade later, still has doubters.
One big reason was testing. Apple's maps were great in California but not in most other places. This is also why the iPhone 4 was given to trusted Apple employees to test outside their Cupertino campus. And while losing prototype hardware is pretty rare, it drives home the difficulty of keeping products secret while also using them in public to ensure they're up to snuff. The good thing is Apple didn't miss a beat. I'm sure Google will do the same. Also, let's hope the WearOS weirdness Google has done with Samsung gets some further refinement and competition. Android users deserve as good a watch experience as Apple users get.