Items tagged with wear os
Qualcomm has been on a crusade to iterate at lightning fast speeds with its smartphone SoCs, but the same can’t be said for its efforts with the rapidly growing wearables market – specifically with smartwatches. The company announced its lightly refreshed Snapdragon Wear 3100 platform way back in September 2018, which itself came more than two years after the introduction of the Snapdragon Wear 2100. Today, Qualcomm is taking another step forward with the new Snapdragon Wear 4100 platform, which is built on a smaller 12nm process node versus the relatively ancient 28nm on its predecessor. The chip company is promising significant gains not only in performance with new...
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Motorola made a huge splash onto the smartwatch scene with its striking first-generation Moto 360 smartwatch running Android Wear. Motorola followed it up with a second-generation design with even more customizations, and then the smartwatch simply fizzled out. Well, the Moto 360 is back, baby; but it's not being produced by Lenovo/Motorola. Instead, the device's name and design has been licensed by a company called eBuyNow. Motorola has even given its blessing to emblazon its logo on one of the side buttons. The casing is made of stainless steel (in natural, rose gold, and sand-blasted phantom black finishes) and still has the classic 1.2-inch circular OLED display (390x390,...
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As promised, Fossil today formally introduced its Gen 5 smartwatch family utilizing the Wear OS by Google platform. The new smartwatches bring with them some nifty upgrades, including a handy perk for iPhone owners, and start at $295, which is just $20 more than some of the Gen 4 models (though pricing has been slashed to $179 on some of the Gen 4 watches). One of the features Fossil is focused on with its Gen 5 family is "multi-day battery life." This is due in large part to the energy-efficient Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 platform that the Gen 5 models are built around. The Snapdragon 3100 SoC should also provide some performance improvements, though we have not spent any hands-on (wrists-on?)...
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Google has announced an update to its Wear OS that powers many of the wearables available on the market today. The big change here is that Wear OS now has Tiles, which are essentially little information cards that you can scroll through. The update lets users continue to swipe right-to-left to access information like more detailed fitness graphics and upcoming calendar apartments. Tiles are customizable and include Goals, Next event, Forecast, Heart Rate, Headlines, and Timer. Goals pulls information from Google Fit, Next event comes from the Google Calendar, Forecast comes from Weather, and Headlines draws from Google News. Google notes that the Tiles will let users check progress...
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Google has been making moves in recent weeks to beef up its Wear OS and the hardware that runs the operating system for wearable devices. In mid-January, the company spent $40 million to acquire key Fossil smartwatch intellectual property and members of the company's research and development team. Now, it appears that Google is looking for a Vice President of Hardwire Engineering for Wearables, which is a new position. The job listing was posted to the Google Careers website, and shows that Google is finally starting to take the wearables market seriously. The company launched Android Wear back in 2014, and rebranded it as Wear OS in March 2018. After Motorola made a splash with...
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It looks as though Google is starting to get serious [again] about its Wear OS and the smartwatches that use the operating system. The Fossil Group announced today that Google is purchasing $40 million worth of intellectual property that pertains to its [in-development] smartwatch technology. Fossil is one the most prominent manufacturers of Wear OS smartwatches, and sells a number of different styles ranging in price from $250 to around $350. In addition to its IP, Fossil says that Google has also acquired a portion of its R&D team. However, Fossil still has over 200 R&D team members that will continue to advance both the software and hardware side of its smartwatch operations....
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The smartwatch sector is starting to heat up, and according to IDC, the Apple Watch is leading the way. However, devices based on Google's Wear OS are also putting up a good fight, and they will now have some much-needed ammunition in the form the new Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 Platform. Snapdragon Wear 3100 is the successor to the long-in-the-tooth Snapdragon Wear 2100 Platform that debuted way back in the first quarter of 2016. With its new platform, Qualcomm is promising big gains not only in performance, but also in power efficiency. Snapdragon Wear 3100 is powered by a quad-core Cortex-A7 processor cluster that works in conjunction with an efficient DSP and an ultra-low power co-processor...
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Earlier this morning, we brought you news that Google is set to revamp its Wear OS with a more intuitive user interface, and now we're learning about a new hybrid Wear OS smartwatch on the way from a pioneer in digital watches: Casio. Today at IFA 2018, Casio unveiled the WSD-F30, which is a bit narrower (by 3.9mm) and thinner compared to its WSD-F20 predecessor. The smartwatch's 1.2-inch display takes a dual-layer approach: there's a monochrome LCD to showcase things like time, altitude and atmospheric pressure (Multi Timepiece Mode), and a 390x390 color OLED display to handle the full brunt of Wear OS. Compared to the WSD-F20, the biggest addition is Extend Mode, which uses Casio’s...
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Google is revamping its Wear OS (formerly known as Android Wear) platform for smartwatches, with a focus on making it quicker and easier to access information and notifications. Users can also expect more proactive help from the Google Assistant, the company says, along with "smarter health coaching" (which was previously rumored), all by simply swiping. "We’re evolving the design of Wear OS by Google to help you get the most out of your time," Google stated in a blog post. Part of that entails making it easier to browse, dismiss, and take action on notifications by way of a new notification stream. Wear OS uses can now swipe up to see all of their notifications at once, and then tap on...
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AI is being integrated into everything from speakers that are placed around your home to smartphones, cars, and wearables today. One of the places that AI assistance can have a big impact on the lives of users is when it comes to health. Wearables running Wear OS and the Apple Watch already can detect early warning signs of very serious health conditions like diabetes. Google is working on something, according to a new rumor, that will take AI-assisted health and fitness to the next level. This system is called Google Coach (known as Project Wooden internally) and it will be more than an exercise tracker and go well beyond what Google Fit currently offers according to reports. Google Coach...
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Anyone who has ever owned a smartwatch can tell you that they are great as long as they are charged nightly (or at least every other night). A watch from a Chinese firm Mobvoi dubbed the TicWatch Pro claims to be able to provide up to 30 days of battery life via a 415mAh battery. It can achieve that long battery life due to the fact that it has two screens integrated into the face of the wearable. The top layer of the screen sandwich is a traditional LCD that gives you black numbers on a greyish face like many digital watches and calculators that have been around for decades. Layered under that power miserly traditional LCD screen is the brightly colored and sleek AMOLED screen that smartwatches...
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You wouldn't think there could be a whole lot of mystery and intrigue in the smartwatch market, but there is plenty of both surrounding Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S4 (or Galaxy Gear). The big question surrounding the new wrist piece is whether Samsung will once again forge ahead with its Tizen, or make the jump over to Google's Android-based Wear OS. The latest chatter suggests the latter. Update: turns out these were actually just one-offs made by Google and seeded to some Samsung workers (i.e. keep moving, nothing to see here). — Evan Blass (@evleaks) June 7, 2018 Let's back up a moment. Back in May, famed leaker Evan Blass (known as @evleaks on Twitter) posted a tweet saying that Samsung...
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The wearables market might not be exactly booming right now, but regardless growth is expected in the segment. Apple is currently leading with its Apple Watch. However, Google is aiming to take the wearables fight directly to Apple, and hinted back in May that it could be rolling out a Pixel Wearable running its Android Wear OS to directly combat Apple. We have some detail on what to expect from Google for its forthcoming wearable and at the heart of the smartwatches will be a Qualcomm chip. Qualcomm chips haven't exactly been confirmed, but there were strong hints from Qualcomm's Pankaj Kedia, senior director and business lead for Smart Wearables, that they are coming. CNET reports...
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Have you still not been bowled over by the smartwatch movement? Don't worry, not many people have so far, but LG is reportedly looking to launch a hybrid wearable that would combine the traditional mechanical operation of a wrist watch with the smart features afforded by Google's Wear OS. LG Watch Sport According to a new report, the LG Watch Timepiece will have a stainless-steel body with an IP68 water/dust resistance rating. The physical watch hands (with quartz movement) are said to sit above a 1.2-inch display panel with a resolution of 360x360. Other specs are similar to other run-of-the-mill Wear OS devices, including a Qualcomm Snapdragon 2100 processor with 768MB RAM, 4GB of internal...
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Earlier this month word was going around that Google might be rebranding its Android Wear wearables operating system to Wear OS. That rebrand has happened and the very first developer preview of the new operating system is now available. There are a couple caveats to this early developer preview of the OS, with the biggest being that Wear OS is only supported on two Huawei smartwatches. The supported devices include the Huawei Watch 2 and Huawei Watch 2 Classic, and this release is in no way geared toward everyday consumers. Google is specifically calling attention to a few features of Wear OS in the developer preview. Google wrote, “To improve app compatibility, Android P has started the...
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It looks as though there are some changes afoot for Google's smartwatch operating system, which has been called Android Wear since its inception three years ago. Android Wear, which is now up to version 2.8, will reportedly soon receive a rebrand to “Wear OS”. According to a redditor named H3x0n that received a pairing notification for his smartwatch, he noticed a new logo along with the Wear OS designation. 9to5Google adds that the notification was sent via Google Play Services, which is currently at version 12.2 (most recent stable release). However, H3x0n is running the newly released Android P Developer Preview, which is running version 12.4 of Google Play Services. With the 12.5...
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