Pixel Watch 3 and Wear OS 5 made moving to a different phone wildly easy

I’ve been sitting on this for a bit, but last night was the right time for me to move back over to my Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5. I’ve had the foldable itch for about a month at this point, but I’ve declined to make the actual move over. I spent a few days with the Pixel 9 Pro Fold and while it is a lovely device, I actually find the ergonomics to be a bit better with the Z Fold 5 for my use cases. Plus, Joe’s looking to make the switch to the Pixel 9 Pro Fold shortly, so I knew if I was going back to the tablet-in-pocket setup, it was back to Samsung for me.

We’re actually working with Samsung to get a few more pieces of their ecosystem puzzle to make some content around how the new Galaxy Chromebook Plus fits into their existing world, so getting back to a Samsung phone for a short time makes sense for that as well.

I suppose I mainly share all of this to ease any potential fears that I’m fed up with the Pixel 9 Pro XL. It’s actually the opposite and I still really do love that phone quite a bit. I just happen to have the luxury of having both phones at my disposal, and sometimes I just want to change things up for a bit. That’s all.

Changing phones with Wear OS 5 is a breeze

So, part of that change was obviously getting my Pixel Watch 3 over onto a different phone. In the past, this has been a mess, requiring a full-blown reset and restart of the watch to get it connected to a new phone. I’ve not had too much actual hands-on experience with this process since the updates to Wear OS that allow for easy phone swapping, so I was still a bit hesitant to dive into all of it.

But I’m not kidding when I tell you that I was in the middle of another, arbitrary process this morning and before I was done with that other task, I’d clicked through the steps to move the Pixel Watch 3 over to the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 and I was absolutely blown away by how simple, seamless, and quick the whole thing was.

I just opened the settings on the Pixel Watch 3, went to System > Transfer watch and hit the check mark and off we went. I’d previously installed the Pixel Watch app on the Galaxy Z Fold 5, so I just opened up the app, it found the watch, and I agreed to the pairing prompts. A few screens later and it was done! I even had to sign into Fitbit on this phone during the process, and I’m not exaggerating when I tell you it took less than 5 minutes all told.

Compared with how cumbersome it used to be to move your watch from one phone to another, this is a massive upgrade not only in promise, but in practice. I’m sure this isn’t something most of you do on a very regular basis – I know it isn’t for me. So I simply wanted to share my very brief journey to encourage you that – when the time does inevitably come – the process is beyond simple. Well done, here, Google.