Google and Samsung merge their wearable OSes, tease Fitbit baked into the combo

Samsung and Google have decided to combine their wearable operating system efforts in what looks like an admission that developers don't care about either. The plan will see Samsung's Tizen OS combined with the Wear OS Google offers to all-comers. The result will be called "Wear" and both companies are saying it will deliver …

[Phil Kingston]

>make Samsung’s own smartphone fitness apps obsolete

Six voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced

[zuckzuckgo]

But this is just the first step. At least 9,999 more steps are recommended for a healthy ecosystem.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Performance

“made apps start up to 30% faster on the latest chipsets with smooth user interface animations and motion

Ditch the animations and get faster app startup and more battery life

[TiredNConfused80]

Well...

Should probably have waited a bit longer before dipping my toe in the wearable water before buying a galaxy watch last week! (I would hope the new os gets pushed to newer models but well...)

[Francis Boyle]

"exciting new wrist-based experiences"

And here's me thinking those sort of apps were banned.

[Shak]

Correlated?

Maybe it's not about apps. Maybe only those who purchase Apple products are interested in smartwatches, and this is a lost cause.

[Pascal Monett]

The platform is the problem

You have a tiny screen, a minimal amount of input vectors, and less power than what it takes to make a cup of coffee.

With those limitations, you're not going to implement a wearable version of LibreOffice. What can you possibly create that will have any interest whatsoever ?

You basically can't connect to the Internet, the power drain will kill the thing in no time.

Watch a video ? Are you kidding me ?

MP3 ? Nope. Not until you have a wearable mini fusion reactor.

Tell time, alert to emails with a Blutooth link to your phone that is in your pocket or beltpouch, use existing sensors to give information on temperature and humidity, maybe heart rythm, and that's just about the limit. No wearable is going to do anything meaningful if it's not paired with a smartphone - that's where the power is.

There's not much room to get all hot and bothered.

[Fonant]

Re: The platform is the problem

Yes. The email/SMS/alarm notifications are by far the most useful feature, other than old-fashioned "telling the time".

Cheap Fitbit works OK indoors, but screen isn't bright enough outside. Fitbits also seem to be designed to fail soon after the warranty expires. Quite fun to repair, building one out of working parts from failed ones, though :)

[iron]

It's the hardware, stupid!

The problem is not the OS, Tizen is quite decent in fact. No, the problem is the hardware - specifically the steam-powered Qualcomm SoCs for wearables. Qualcomm have been repackaging the same chip since 2014 and calling it new, 2018's 3100 SoC was a 28nm, 1.2GHz quad-core Cortex A7! The latest 4100 SoC is a 12nm, 1.7 GHz quad-core Cortex A53, which is a major upgrade but is still not their 7nm process or the latest ARM designs used for their flagship smartphone chips.

As a dev I will be watching this closely. If the new OS is basically Tizen I may be interested, if its really just Wear OS then this move will make me LESS liekly to develop apps for the platform.

[Jim-234]

I fear this will mean the end for a pretty decent watch OS and we'll be stuck with bloat adware

The Samsung Tizen OS is actually pretty decent for what you need it for on a watch.

The applications that Samsung has put out cover most of what is really practical to do with the watch.

It's very easy to customize how you want it to look and it doesn't go around bothering you.

The google wear OS is a horrible monstrosity that basically wants to tell you what it thinks you should want in stupid dumb ways and is very hard to customize and use as a decent daily driver.

I'm on my 4th version of the Samsung watch and I hope to be able to keep going, but if they totally mess up the software, why bother.