At its annual developers’ conference in May this year Google announced a total overhaul of its wearable platform and previewed the OS for smartwatches. Google said that the Wear OS 3 updates will start rolling out to a limited set of smartwatches in the “second half of 2022.”
Google worked with Samsung and Tizen to come up with an OS with faster performance, longer battery life and a “thriving developer community” for third-party apps. It also integrates health tracking from Fitbit in a pretty major way.
Google is now referring to the unified platform as “Wear OS 3.”
Google announces Wear OS 3 upgrade for smartwatches
Hence, Wear OS users were excited about the update and anxious to have Fossil and MobVoi confirm whether their watches will be carrying the update. Till June end, there were no indications from the companies about any such possibility. Samsung was the first to confirm that its new Galaxy Watch will be the first to run the new OS.
Google has now clarified some concerns of smartwatches who were afraid that the latest update would not run on their devices.
The issue about compatibility occurred as customer support agents dealing with the gadgets were not clear about its functionality and added features.
Google has now put to rest all queries concerning the update issue for the smartwatches. It announced that only a few devices already on sale will get the Wear OS 3 update. These watches are the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 3 GPS TicWatch Pro 3 Cellular/LTE, and TicWatch E3 .
Meanwhile, Google also said that Fossil will be releasing new watches.
In an interview recently, Fossil revealed it was making a premium Gen 6 device leveraging the new Wear OS this fall.
In a press statement, Fossil’s Chris Hartley revealed, “At Fossil Group, we are always striving for new innovation and increased performance in our products. Thanks to our continued partnership with Qualcomm and the launch of our upcoming smartwatches later this year, Fossil believes it’s bringing the best possible Wear OS smartwatch to the market this year.”
It seems possible that Fossil’s Gen 6 could run on a chipset that’s newer than the Snapdragon Wear 4100 series.
The TicWatch models slated to receive the update all run the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100, making it clear that any device running OS Wear needs to be running Snapdragon 4100.
Google has cautioned that watches not natively running on Wear OS 3 and upgraded to the new Wear might experience some unspecified “impacts” on the user experience. However, it was not clear whether these watches will miss out on certain features or there will be performance lag.
Smartwatches running chips below 4100 are going to experience difficulties. They will not give optimal performances, but Google still wanted to provide an option for the upgrade to people who bought the watches very recently.
The Wear OS 3 update will be optional to individual owners of TicWatch and Fossil Group products. However, people who upgrade will have to factory reset the device. Google promises to “provide more details in advance of the update so you can make an informed decision.”
