Winners and Losers: Pixel Watch comes to life while iPod bites the dust

OPINION: Want to cut through the noise and get straight to the biggest tech stories of the week? Trusted Reviews’ Winners and Losers has you covered.

As if Google wasn’t popular enough already, the search-engine giant is all anyone’s been talking about in the tech world this week thanks to the company’s I/O 2022 event. From anticipated devices such as the Pixel Watch and the Pixel 6a, to relative surprises like the upcoming Pixel tablet, Google gave us no shortage of products and Android updates to look forward to, but for my money, it’s the long-awaited appearance of the Pixel Watch that takes the cake.

As for this week’s loser, there were a few decent contenders in the running, most notably being the impending arrival of ads on Netflix and the dismantling of Three’s 3G network. But in the end, it could only be the announcement that Apple’s iPod line is going the way of the dinosaur that led us all to have a moment of sombre remembrance for an absolute pioneer of modern tech.

Winner: Pixel Watch

I’ve since lost track of the number of years I’ve spent following and covering rumours for the illusive Pixel Watch, so to see Google’s first party wearable finally see the light of day felt like a moment of vindication. Truth be told, the Pixel Watch should have launched several times already to capitalise on Wear OS at various points in its existence, but the fact that it’s here at all is fine by me.

Admittedly, there’s still a lot that we don’t know about the Pixel Watch and Google has promised to unveil more in the lead up to its release in autumn. From the little we do know however, the Pixel Watch is shaping up to be the Apple Watch contender we’ve all been waiting for.

For starters, Fitbit integration with the watch could be its killer feature. Apple has made several gains in the world of fitness over the last few years, but it still doesn’t boast the same chops as Fitbit which has been developing an accessible experience with an increasing lean towards mental wellbeing since its inception.

Google has also hinted at seamless integration between the Pixel Watch and its own apps such as Maps, Google Wallet and Google Assistant. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise but it is fantastic news if you have a Pixel phone as it sounds like the same harmonic relationship that iPhones currently share with the Apple Watch – something that Android users have had to witness from afar with envy.

Loser: iPod

There’s a good chance that almost every reader here has a fond memory or two of Apple’s iPod range. Designed to be the music player to put a thousand songs in your pocket, the iPod was easily the must-have device of the early 2000s.

Those classic commercials of the same era helped to cement the iPod’s popularity over competing MP3 players (Zune never stood a chance). I’ll never forget being gifted a fifth-gen iPod Classic and firmly believing at the time that it was the absolute peak of innovation.

The scroll wheel was so intuitive that almost anyone could figure how to use it, and the fact that that particular iPod brought video playback into the fold just meant that I got an endless amount of entertainment value from it.

All this nostalgia has been brought about by the news that Apple is discontinuing the current iPod Touch, marking the end of the iPod brand as a whole. So as we mourn this classic piece of tech history, I implore you all to think back on your own experiences with the iPod and, at the very least, appreciate just how much the iPod contributed to our current love of entertainment on the go.