One of the joys of owning a watch with industry standard lug bars is how any strap, providing it’s the correct width, can be fitted to your watch, giving it a whole new look for a fraction of the price of a new timepiece.
This is also the case with some smartwatches, but not all. Specifically, the Apple Watch and Google Pixel Watch use proprietary connection for their straps, meaning that only bands sold by the manufacturer can be fitted.
Apple and others offer a wide range of straps, and the Watch has been out for so long now that loads of companies sell adapters to fit regular straps. This hasn’t been the case with the Pixel Watch.
Google sells the Crafted Leather Band, which comes with adapters for accepting a regular strap, but Google doesn’t offer these adapters on their own.
Thankfully, the smartwatch accessory industry has started to catch up. There are now several companies selling strap adapters for the Pixel Watch, in various sizes and finishes to suit your watch and whichever strap you choose to pair it with.
As highlighted by Droidlife, there are multiple options available now on Amazon, although we’ve found that some are currently sold out in the UK. Adapters available to both US and UK shoppers are priced at around $9 to $12, or £5 to £9, and can be bought in black, gold, rose gold and silver finishes.
We can’t speak for their quality, as we haven’t tried them for ourselves, so we urge readers to check user reviews and star ratings before making a purchase.
Hopefully though, this is just the start for customising the Pixel Watch. As long as the smartwatch itself proves popular, we should eventually see a third-party strap and accessory market as vibrant and buoyant as that for the Apple Watch.
Key here will be the Pixel Watch’s popularity, and also if Google retains the same strap connectors for future generations of its wearable, as Apple has across generations of Watch.
