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During I / O 2021 in May, Google announced a complete overhaul of its portable platform. We’ve since seen the new operating system previewed on an emulator, while Samsung has confirmed that the new Galaxy Watch will be the first to run it. There are still many questions about Wear OS 3, and Google today addressed the update situation for current watch owners.
For starters, Google now officially refers to the unified platform as “Wear OS 3”. Since its announcement, there has been a lot of confusion over whether this upcoming portable operating system will work on existing smartwatches. It was partly seeded by customer service agents making conflicting statements, and two major watchmakers finally made statements in June on upgrade plans that were not yet finalized.
Google today lifted the uncertainty and definitively announced that only a few devices already on sale today will benefit from the Wear OS 3 update. These watches are the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 3 GPS (evaluation), TicWatch Pro 3 Cellular / LTE and TicWatch E3 (evaluation).
Meanwhile, Google has tacitly revealed that there will be new watches launched by Fossil Group and Mobvoi that won’t run Wear OS 3 out of the box but have the option to update later. In the case of Fossil, today’s statement once again confirmed that a “new generation of devices” is coming “this year”.
The TicWatch models that are expected to receive the update all run the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100 announced last June, giving an overview of the minimum hardware requirements.
However, Google has warned that watches that do not natively run Wear OS 3 – that is, those that are upgraded after launch – will see unspecified “impacts” on user experience in “some cases. limits”. The company did not say today whether these were new features unavailable or performance constraints. The implication is that even devices running a chip from last year aren’t able to run the unified platform optimally given how important the next Wear OS upgrade is, but Google always wanted to provide these recent buyers with an upgrade path.
For this reason, the Wear OS 3 update will be optional and made available on an optional basis to individual owners of TicWatch and Fossil Group products. End users who decide to upgrade will have to factory reset the device during the process and start over. Google promises to “provide more details before the update so you can make an informed decision.”
As for the timeline, partners won’t start upgrading Wear OS 3 until “mid-second half of 2022”.
Wear OS 2.0 users who decide not to upgrade will continue to enjoy new app experiences comparable to Gboard and the Material You Play Store, as well as security updates for at least two years from date. when the device is launched.
“We’re committed to delivering new experiences to current Wear OS users and those who choose not to upgrade. “
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