Today, we’re sharing the biggest update to Wear ever – built with your preferences in mind. We’ve been hard at work in three areas: building a unified platform with Samsung, delivering a new consumer experience and providing updates to your favorite Google apps.
WearOS definitely needs a lot of love, and this is a big sign Google is taking the platform seriously. Merging with Samsung’s incompatible Tizen efforts makes sense, and adding Google’s acquisition of FitBit into the mix is a no-brainer, too. I’m one of the few people who actually likes WearOS – warts and all – so I’m excited to see what the future brings here.
This is a very interesting combination. Obviously Samsung and Google are competitors (Pixel vs Galaxy, Assistant vs Bixby, Fitbit vs Samsung Fit). However there is significant potential to work together.
Last year there was also cooperation between Apple and Google on privacy aware COVID contact tracing.
Not wasting redundant efforts is actually good step. I hope the cooperation happens more.
What terrifies me is that they say “battery lasts 30% more over old Wear OS”; isn’t that too little? That makes me think that it is really based off Wear OS, not tizen, as AFAIK, tizen devices have double the battery duration of Wear OS devices (in my experience 4 days typical in Tizen vs 2 days in Wear OS). That 30% could be attributed to using Exynos processors instead of Qualcomm ones.
Also, they say the combined OS will use the android tooling. Tizen OS can be programmed in C (abandoned by Samsung, lots of bugs), Javascript/HTML (supported) and C# (supported, but amazingly the APIs are not exactly the same as in Javascript/HTML). Android tooling would mean all this go out of the window.
Samsung also needed to up the game in watches, as their hardware is OK but the team doing the software is… let’s say underwhelming to be nice; bugs doesn’t get fixed (i.e. “always on” mode is really “sometimes on”, flickering the last glanced time before showing the real current time when powering on the display…) and usability is worsening from version to version (buttons on the display are getting smaller on each update, hardware buttons are underused…).
All in all, it doesn’t seem such good news to me :(.
Edit: sp.
I’m not entirely sure that using Android tooling is a bad thing in this case. A vast majority of developers I know who have worked with both Android and Tizen hate working with Tizen with a fiery passion, with the general stance being that while it’s got some huge advantages for end-users over WearOS, it’s not worth all the hassle involved in development.
I understand/share the frustation when developing for Tizen, but the problem with using the android tooling is that the runtime is huge and that hurts the battery life. Note that the js/HTML environment for Tizen is equally hungry, but most of the system apps seem to be coded in C using EFL, so at least the base software is lean (although buggy).
All in all, what you want to do in a watch is usualy not very complex, but the stacks they are trying to use are really an overkill. My Galaxy Watch LTE has 768MB of RAM! Having more RAM uses more battery. And on top of that they use frameworks with hundreds of processes/services…
I know that they want something visually appealing, but surely there are other ways to reach that goal. I mean, if they could do a simple framework, don’t know, perhaps using lua, lottie animations for the eye candy and SDL2 for the rest, I’m sure it wouldn’t be a lot of work to have a healthy number of watchfaces and games…
It is about how much work is actually done on the device.
My first “smart” watch was a Pebble, and the battery easily lasted a week or more. The screen was e-Ink and was always on, but overall provided very little functionality (basic notifications, and a few games), and a very clunky user interface (no touch).
My Samsung lasted shorter (2? days), and a little bit more functionality, but eventually fell apart.
Now, my Fossil watch can only last a day with an always on screen, even when it is OLED. And switching to “extended” use makes it more than two days, but requires pushing the face buttons to wake it up (i.e: checking the time is no longer a simple action). It does check hearth rate, acceleration (work out detection), GPS, etc all the time, and Bluetooth and WiFi are always online. That might be too much to do in a small package with a very limited battery.
Overall doing less -> more battery runtime, doing more -> obviously less.
sukru,
That is true, but at the same time a lot of our modern frameworks are terribly bloated and require obscene amounts of hardware like Antartica_ mentions. I’m not convinced that we cannot have devices that are simultaneously user friendly and efficient, but it could require us to go back to developing things the old way before we had humongous frameworks – it’s not clear to me that we are willing to do that. I think bloated software is here to stay.
Alfman,
Well, yes the stacks are bloated, and we would benefit from cutting the excess.
That being said.
WiFi will use much more power than Bluetooth or 4G: https://www.clearevo.com/ecodroidlink/bluetooth_vs_wifi_on_android_battery_consumption/ (more than 25% diff)
Always on display will use more power than manual:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WearOS/comments/a9jc15/battery_consumption_test_results_always_on/ (again more than 25% diff)
Heartrate monitor uses a lot of power:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WearOS/comments/cxdop8/bug_constant_heart_rate_drains_battery_very_fast/ (don’t know how much exactly, though)
These are all hardware, and make at least 50%, probably much more difference.
Add the software bloat, and it adds up to a lot.
I still wait for a next gen e-Ink based simple displays, but I am not holding my breath.
sukru,
Yes, but does wifi really need to be on all the time in a watch? Wifi was mostly designed for performance, not battery life. Bluetooth was designed for low power applications and is always improving. Wifi is overkill for a watch, better to have a phone do the heavy lifting IMHO.
Old LCD watches had runtimes measured in years instead of days or hours. Even the models that could run small programs for taking notes/calendar/contacts/etc. Granted these were only B&W LCD and quite elementary, but it clearly proves that it’s possible to have an always on display that doesn’t drain so quickly. Maybe they need to reconsider backlights that can be turned on only as needed like the indeglo watches back in the day. You only had to use the light it in the dark, but otherwise the display is easily visible in broad daylight without constantly sucking power. Heck, I can’t even use my phone in broad daylight without finding shade. I think it’s a mistake to shoehorn conventional PC display technology into a watch. Given that we’re a couple decades into wrist based micro-processing, I think we ought to be able to do better without compromising so much battery life.
While we can cram APIs and technology designed for a phone into a watch, it’s quite evident to me that the inefficiency of this approach makes it unsuitable. I think old school engineers with access to new technology could do a better job, but maybe that’s just my take.
It may be cool to have a watch that can do health monitoring, but if it is really so important that this be monitored 24×7, then IMHO a watch that dies in a day misses the mark anyways. So in my opinion it would be better to perform this function periodically or on demand instead of draining the battery completely every day.
So, I think some of these smart watching are trying to be a poor phone replacement than a great watch upgrade, for me anyways. But then, I don’t really feel the need to have a watch with fancy features to make a fashion statement, haha.
…
I concede smart watches can have some good uses, I see the appeal of looking at your wrist instead of taking out a phone to check a notification, etc. I view the smart watch as an auxiliary device like ear pods. They’re best at extending the functionality of another device like a mobile phone, but not that great on their own.
When engineered to be an auxiliary device rather than a primary device, I think it could offer a decent experience without all the inefficiencies that have lead to smart watches having such a short battery life.
It’s been crossing my mind to buy an old school mechanical automatic winding watch. That said I’m happy with the watch I have as it’s accurate and the battery lasts a few years. Ladies watches are small. How men can wear those gargantuan bricks on their arms I have no idea.
What does anyone need a heartrate monitor and email notification and other nonsense? It seems to me it’s a fantasy appealing to the need to fiddle. If you’re healthy and organised yourself with people it’s mostly useless. Like, you’re not a 24/7 ten anti-acid pills a day exec Olympian athlete with a fleet of staff at your heels. Nobody cares! It’s like lb1000 sneakers for toddlers and the sneakers last longer on a toddler than one of these silly watches lasts.
Okay, so I get these watches are status symbols of belonging like Louboutin heels but do you really need to sit there in a meeting looking at your wrist in an exaggerrated discrete way or walk in a door waving your arm and pointing at your wrist, “Look. Me. I have a smartwatch. Eh? Eh?” Speaking of which there’s probably a market for that. In this age of paranoia it would be an easy upsell to have a setting which detects your smart watch and sets off flashing lights and a klaxxon to announce the arrival of this royal Ming vase like artifact in the building. I’m sure your boss would lean in with one of those knowing looks and your colleague look on in awe! The fact you’re so unfit you’re one bleep away from a medical incident, too awkward to be relaxed about your contacts and friends, and too poor to afford a secretary will pass them by because you have a SMARTWATCH.
Yes, I know billionaires and wannabe billionaires wear smartwatches but they are part of the ecosystem selling you this stuff so it’s just part of the sell. Like the politician who drinks beer in the pub and instant the cameras are off they are knocking back wine, the instant this watch is off because what is the point in being super rich if the plebs live rent free in your head? It’s like the con game Branson pulls. You too can experience Branson’s lifestyle for lbX,000 by joining this club in London while he’s a 1000 miles away at a Michellin restaurant in the Swiss Alps before jetting back to his private island which you paid for!
Having some computing power on your wrist does have its advantages.
In my case I’ve been using watches that did more than giving the time most of my life (I think I was 13 y/o when I started using a Casio Databank DBC-60 http://www.digital-watch.com/DWL/1work/casio_dbc-60 ), and while some watches have been more useful than others, they have been helpful in my day-to-day.
But with the advent of the mobile phone their usefulness has diminished a lot.
Personally, the main use of having the Galaxy Watch LTE is having a backup phone always with me (I’m forgetful, so sometimes I leave the mobile phone at home… the watch has the same phone number of the main phone so either works for my incoming/outgoing calls). But that doesn’t speak well of the smart functions of the watch… it could be a dumbphone and I wouldn’t miss a lot. At the end of the day, the included browser has worked for me in a pinch, and having simple games like 2048 is appreciated by the kids, but that is it.
When I had the Gear S I did some programs for it, but with the Galaxy Watch I didn’t manage to have internet connectivity in my programs, so I stopped wasting time fighting the platform. I really miss the days of the Ruputer/OnHandPC; making a useful program for the watch was doable in a single weekend. Now the smart watches are beautiful, but very difficult to make them work for ad-hoc purposes.