As expected, Google took advantage of its annual I/O developers conference to talk about Wear OS 5, its next update to the smartwatch operating system and here are the four most important news.
There’s a buzz around Wear OS this year, and that’s a result of many interesting smartwatches hitting the market over the past couple of years, including Google’s Pixel Watch 2.
Google claims its user base grew 40% in 2023, so you definitely want to know what’s coming to the wearable platform in the next full version upgrade.
When does Wear OS 5 launch?
Although Google only talked about the developer preview during its keynote/release, it did confirm that Wear OS 5, based on Android 14, is “coming later this year.”
And you may not have to wait long since Wear OS 4 arrived in August 2023 with the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 series.
If the same thing happens this year, we’ll see the Wear OS 5 launch in July during Samsung’s next Unpacked event, where it will unveil the Galaxy Watch 7 lineup.
Longer battery life
It’s no secret that one of the downsides of many Wear OS smartwatches – with a few exceptions like the OnePlus Watch 2 – is limited battery life.
Google is making this a priority in the next release and states that “Wear OS 5 brings performance improvements over Wear OS 4.”
The search giant isn’t too specific, but says that if you follow a workout, the device will be more efficient and running a marathon – which lasts around four hours for most people – will use 20% of energy. less energy in Wear OS 5 compared to Wear OS 5. than its predecessor.
This sounds impressive, but is specific to a heavy load scenario, so it remains to be seen whether Wear OS 5 can also last longer during lighter usage periods.
Better watch faces
This year, Google is making improvements to the Watch Face Format – the tool used to create watch faces for Wear OS – and these will be primarily focused on “flavors”, complications and weather.
Flavors will essentially allow you to see and choose different versions of a watch face with differences including color theme and included complications.
Complications – the small parts of a watch face that provide you with useful data – will support “goal progress” (for data such as step count) as well as “weighted elements” which “goal progress” (for data such as step count) can represent discrete subsets of data, showing their relative sizes, where otherwise you could use something like a pie chart.
The final key upgrade is the ability to display weather data as part of a watch face so it can provide you with the current temperature and weather or even a forecast for the next few hours.
Larger smartwatch screens
Although a common complaint about smartwatches is their size and weight – especially for those with smaller wrists – Google suggests we could see even larger screens in the future.
In a section of the I/O press materials titled “Larger Screens,” Google said: “With the momentum surrounding Wear OS, we’re seeing a greater variety of round screen sizes and resolutions, which offers more choices to the user. »
With this, the company is releasing new guidelines on how developers can create responsive user interfaces for a range of watch screen sizes.
These guidelines were not available at the time of writing, but it certainly seems like Google is expecting even larger smartwatch screens than we already have.
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