Last month at its I/O developer conference, Google confirmed Wear OS 4 is in the works with a selection of big improvements for wearable owners.
Now, thanks to Samsung’s Wear OS 4-toting One UI Watch 5 beta, 9to5Google He spotted a small but very welcome improvement in the quality of life for those who find themselves fiddling with smartphones.
The upgrade change log reads “Move your watch without resetting”. “Switch your watch to a new phone, but keep your apps, watch faces, and more. You can start in your watch’s general settings in the Galaxy Wearable app.”
Site contributor Max Weinbach took some pictures of how this looks in practice, which you can see below. In short, you have to make sure that the Google account on the new phone matches the one on your watch. But if it does, you can connect the two and continue without interruption.
It’s not just for those who switch phones frequently, of course. The average phone contract is two years, and since people don’t tend to change their smartwatches half as frequently, most people will have to reset their wearables at least once during the lifetime of ownership. How difficult it is depends on how much time you spend customizing it to your taste.
It’s possible that this will be a Galaxy Watch exclusive, of course, and won’t be part of the public Wear OS 4 release — but it seems likely that this will come to Google’s Pixel Watch at least, since it’s meant to be a demonstration of exactly what it can do. OS.
Full details of Wear OS 4 haven’t been fully confirmed, but Google says it will improve battery life, add restore support, include new watch face widgets and better accessibility features, like a much-improved text-to-speech engine.
As for the One UI Watch 5 update, it mainly focuses on health and safety. There’s a new dedicated heart rate zone, an interval training program with five intensity levels, and better sleep metrics on the watch itself.
New SOS features add location relay and medical information, but perhaps most exciting of all, it looks like you’ll be able to get quick battery readouts for all your connected devices:
– Battery widget is really exciting about this one. Although it’s currently broken for me because it doesn’t show my phone or my buds and my phone doesn’t seem to show my watch battery either pic.twitter.com/KJHUNihm1JJune 8, 2023
No Wear OS 4 release date has been revealed, but with the Pixel Watch 2 appearing heavily alongside the Pixel 8 this fall, an October or November release would make sense, if it hadn’t already appeared by then.
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