Google turned the thrill around its next major update to its Wear OS platform and doused it with the cold water of uncertainty. After teasing the improvements that Wear OS 3 would bring back the table, Google left people hanging on whether existing smartwatches, especially those released within the past year and a half, would even get the upgrade. Mobvoi is among the few publicly committed to Wear OS 3, but it seems that there’s a little catch to its promise.
There’s still some confusion and many questions on Google’s plans for the Wear and tear OS 3 rollout. Few smartwatch manufacturers have ever committed to upgrading existing models to the upcoming Wear OS release. In addition, there has been speculation that Google raised the minimum hardware requirements for Wear OS 3 that made those older smartwatches incompatible.
Even that, however, isn’t completely clear. the sole new smartwatch launching this year with Wear OS 3 that we all know thus far is Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Watch 4. Mobvoi, the sole one thus far to use the new Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100 platform, just launched a replacement smartwatch, but that didn’t run the new Wear OS. Now it seems that this may be an equivalent story for subsequent TicWatch devices for the remainder of the year until 2022.
In a statement to 9to5Google, the corporate reveals its TicWatch Pro 3 (GPS and LTE models), and therefore, the new TicWatch E3 will be eligible for a Wear OS 3 upgrade coming within the mid to last half of 2022. However, it also notes that future TicWatches will be equivalent, implying that these will launch with the present version of Wear and tear OS, not Wear OS 3.
The good news there’s that Mobvoi will upgrade those future smartwatches, but it does leave some doubt whether it’ll be ready to observe thereon promise. After all, there’s still quite a year before it rolls out the promised update, and tons can happen before then. It also still leaves things for other smartwatches unclear, leaving consumers uncertain about moving forward with Wear OS 3 just around the corner.
