When I wear a timepiece on my wrist it’s got to do something more than just tell the time. My daily tasks are almost identical and I easily lose track of the day of the week. (Those of you who don’t have that problem don’t know the struggle which those of us who do go through on a day to day basis.) Nonetheless, today’s watches generally solve that problem, displaying not only the time, but the day of the week and the day of the month. Smartwatches, on the other hand, display much, much more than that – if you want them to.
In addition to all that, I also get notifications from my apps, I can reply to messages with gestures, canned responses, or even with my voice. When I get tired of one watch face I can swap it out with another, quickly and easily. I can see the current temperature and weather conditions, sunrise and sunset, and so much more!
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I’ve owned an LG G Watch and am now wearing a Motorola Moto 360. Both work well, and each has its own set of strengths and weaknesses. All things considered, I can use either watch in almost exactly the same wayThat’s the advantage of Android Wear, once you know how to do something on one watch, you know how to do it on any other watch – and all the apps that work on one watch will work on any other.Samsung jumped on the Android Wear bandwagon early on, but has been abandoning Android Wear for its own operating system – Tizen. That means current apps that are written for Android with companion code for Android wear won’t work on your Samsung watch. Watch faces that have been painstakingly designed and coded for Android Wear won’t be compatible with your Samsung watch. From a developer perspective, this isn’t good because it fragments wearable environment even more than it already is. What’s more, it’s also “reinventing the wheel”, wasting time, energy, and effort to create a device that’s functionally equivalent to watches powered by Android Wear. Sure, there are some things that Samsung’s watches do that Android Wear simply doesn’t do right now, but that’s not enough to make the case for an entirely new platform, not in my book anyway.
After Samsung’s Unpacked event we learned that Samsung would hold its smartwatch announcement back for IFA in early September, and that the name of the upcoming wearable would be the Gear S2. We saw a few quick pictures, but were left with the distinct impression that it wouldn’t be running Android Wear, and that makes me sad. Sad that Samsung, with its reputation of making beautiful hardware, won’t be adding to the Android ecosystem with its next wearable, and sad that it’s spending so much effort fragmenting the environment in which they’re trying so hard to succeed.
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