Google gave Pixel Watch 5 something Samsung hasn’t delivered yet: an AI assistant that works when you’re completely off the grid. According to SamMobile, offline Gemini support is currently exclusive to the Pixel Watch 5, even though the Galaxy Watch 9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 share the same Wear OS 7 foundation and run on hardware capable of handling it.
Both Samsung watches launched with Wear OS 7 (One UI 9 Watch) and include Gemini integration. But that integration requires a connection. Pixel Watch 5, by contrast, can run Gemini locally, meaning the assistant responds to voice commands even when Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are both unavailable. For a device you wear on your wrist during workouts, hikes, or travel, that’s a real difference, not a marketing footnote.
The offline feature covers a practical set of commands: setting timers, toggling water lock, turning on the flashlight or Wi-Fi, starting a workout, and controlling music playback. Nothing exotic. But having those work without a phone nearby or a data connection is exactly the kind of reliability wearable users actually care about.
Technically, the Galaxy Watch 9 lineup should be able to support it. The watches run on the Snapdragon Wear Elite chip, which is the same class of processor the feature requires. The limitation here is software, not silicon. Samsung just hasn’t shipped it yet.
The broader context matters here. On-device AI is becoming a dividing line across the entire industry. Apple has pushed on-device processing as a privacy and reliability story with Apple Intelligence. Qualcomm has built its Snapdragon lineup around local AI inference. Google is now doing it on the wrist. Samsung, despite being one of the loudest voices in the AI hardware conversation with its Galaxy AI branding, is trailing on this specific front.
To be fair, SamMobile notes that offline Gemini will likely arrive on Galaxy Watch 9 and Ultra 2 via a future software update. The hardware is ready. And when the update does arrive, users will need Gemini app version 1.36 or later installed through the Play Store on their Wear OS device. So this is a gap, not a permanent exclusion.
Still, the gap exists right now. If you’re choosing between a Pixel Watch 5 and a Galaxy Watch 9 Ultra 2 and offline AI responsiveness matters to you, Google currently has the edge. Samsung needs to close this quickly, because letting a competitor own the “works without a connection” story on Wear OS is a strange place for the platform’s biggest hardware partner to be sitting.
