Tag: Wear OS

A new update to the Wear OS by Google app is rolling out in the Play Store today, bringing a handful of improvements to the app and subsequently your Wear OS watch.  The update is version 2.14.0.205078731 for those keeping score at home and it should be available to all Wear users at this point.

The headliner in the update is improvement Google Pay performance.  If you have an NFC watch, you’ve been able to use it to pay for things using Google Pay.  The problem that most users have run into is that it takes too long to open, in some cases up to 15 seconds.  That largely defeats the point as it is faster to get a credit card from your wallet or simply tap your phone to pay.  This update should fix that.

After a few months of rumors, the Ticwatch Pro is finally official.  Price at $249 and available in both Silver & Black, the Pro sports a massive battery life of a minimum of 5 days on a single charge and can go up to 30 days in what the company is calling an “essential” mode.  Powered by Wear OS by Google, it has a AMOLED display with a secondary FSTN LCD display that is the key to the essential mode of the watch.

The new Ticwatch Pro is powered by the Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC, comes with 512 MB of RAM and 4GB of storage.  The AMOLED display is 1.39″ on the 45 mm stainless steelcase.  It has a 415mAh battery, Bluetooth, WiFi and, thankfully, NFC.  The popular Ticwatch S and E models from last year didn’t have NFC so this is certainly a step in the right direction.  Finally, it is IP68 rated for water and dust intrusion.

While it has been pretty clear the past couple of weeks the work that Google has put into Google Assistant on phones, that isn’t the only place they have been improving things.  Wear OS by Google has also been getting a lot of updates lately around Assistant and other features which has significantly improved the overall usefulness of Assistant on your wrist.

Just before Google I/O, Wear OS got a big update that, amongst other things, brought support for Actions in Google Assistant.  As part of that, you can now ask Assistant on your watch to give you a game or score update and have the information displayed on your screen in an easy-to-view format as well as an audio update on the game.

Now that Google I/O has wrapped up for 2018, Android and Google fans are starting to turn their attention to the next hardware event for the Mountain View company.  Rumors are already starting to fly about the upcoming Google Pixel 3 phone series but a new rumor yesterday suggests that we could finally see a Pixel Watch in the mix too.

Wear OS by Google has, much like Android, needed a hero device to show the ultimate experience of what the platform can bring.  It is something I wrote about shortly after the name change from Android Wear and it looks like that could be happening.

For those of you who like to control their music from their Wear OS watch, today is a good day for you.  The Wear OS team, via the product forums, has announced that new features have rolled out to the Wear version of the Google Play Music app that allows for things like Shuffling music and previewing the next track to be played.

The new features impact the Google Play Music app that is installed on Wear OS devices and is rolling out now.  When you get the update (likely you already have you will be able to slide up when music is playing and enable a Shuffle feature on the playlist or album that you are listening to at the time.  Further, you will be able to swipe to see which track is next so you can decide if you want to play it or skip it.

The rebranding exercise last week from Google on Android Wear was an important one, if nothing more than superficial.  Now known as Wear OS by Google, the flavor of Android designed to run on watches, the name change reflects many things that have been changing with the Android naming convention over the past few months.

But the problems for Wear OS are far deeper than a simple name change can fix.  Sure, Google can address the iPhone user market who, they report, is one out of every three Android Wear user today. The fact is, a premium Wear OS watch experience needs to happen and it needs to come from Google.  Just as they have done with phones and Chromebooks, a Google “Pixel Watch” would unleash all the potential of Wear OS to the masses.  But there are big obstacles in the way that have to be addressed.  If there is a company that can sort it out, it is Google.  The question is if they want to do it.