Future Samsung smartwatches could run on Wear OS according to a recent rumor from Evan Blass. In a tweet earlier this morning Blass states that some Samsung employees were seen with Gear watches that have Wear OS instead of Samsung’s own Tizen operating system, which has been the go-to OS for the company’s smartwatches since the original Galaxy Gear launched years ago. Perhaps even more interesting is that this would mark the return for Samsung to Google’s smartwatch operating system. For those unfamiliar, Samsung launched the Gear Live back in 2014 which ran on Android Wear, and was one of the first Android Wear smartwatches alongside the original LG G Watch.
If Samsung does choose to launch a Gear smartwatch with Wear OS instead of Tizen it would open up consumers of the device to more applications. Many more applications, as Wear OS has quite a few more than Tizen and this could be a good thing for the smartwatch industry. Samsung’s lineup of Gear smartwatches has been consistently getting better, with the Gear S3 and the Gear Sport being the latest and fairly popular. For some the only thing that could make them better might be Wear OS as there would be more apps and therefore more features.
For now, there are lots of unknowns to keep in mind, the most obvious being that this is still just a rumor with no actual evidence, though it’s not unlikely that some would pop up in the near future. Should Samsung actually launch a Gear smartwatch with Wear OS there’s no telling when it would plan to announce it officially, and at the moment there’s no mention of any details regarding availability or pricing, though it’s quite possible that any cost of such a watch would be pretty close to what Samsung has charged for its past few smartwatch options, and there could also be varied pricing depending on whether or not there are Wi-Fi-only and LTE models available.