When Samsung launched their first smartwatch, the Galaxy Gear, a few years ago now they did so with the feature to make and take phone calls on your wrist. While the feature wasn’t all that well-executed, the calls were quiet and the quality fairly poor, it was a handy feature to have nonetheless. Imagine taking a quick call on your wrist when in the car or when your hands are full? Needless to say, those that have been an Android Wear user have only been able to dream of such a feature, unless you’re a Huawei Watch owner, in which case the wait to take calls from your wrist might not drag on too much longer.
We’ve seen an update to enable the speaker roll out to some Huawei Watch owners, and during CES 2016 Huawei themselves teased the ability to take calls on the watch in a pretty blatant Tweet. Now, the Google Store’s listing for the Huawei Watch brazenly lists it as featuring a “Built-in Speaker” that can “Take and make phone calls using the watch speaker and hear an alarm or audio message through supported apps.” It seems like this has been a long time coming for not just the Huawei Watch, but Android Wear in general. The platform launched with devices from LG, Motorola and Samsung that all featured microphones, but it’s been a one-way street ever since then. With whisperings of an imminent update to Android 6.0 Marshmallow on Android Wear, this could be the update to enable the speaker inside of the Huawei Watch.
The question remains however, is the Huawei Watch the only Android Wear smartwatch available today that features a speaker, or are there more of them out there? Regardless, it seems 2016 is starting to heat up where Android Wear is concerned, and with Mobile World Congress just around the corner, we could be seeing fresh hardware from the likes of LG and others. The Google Store listing is still live and linked below, and there’s a screenshot with the above quote in plain sight for all to see, too.
