Why buy a smartwatch now when they have existed for over 20 years? The first smartwatch was introduced in 1998 by Seiko and they called it the OnHand PC. It was innovated with the applications that could run on it. You could connect it to a PC, write memos, manage your calendar, keep a to-do list, play games and use a calculator. Wow, all this on the first smartwatch. The biggest problem was it was too big and bulky.
Then Microsoft released their smartwatch in 2004, the Microsoft SPOT (Smart Personal Object Technology. Then came the Sony Ericsson LiveView (2010), the Pebble (2013), and the Apple Watch (2015) emerged that were the first smartwatches to receive data from a phone. With the popularity of the smartphone, in 2014 Google developed Android Wear for wearable devices that would link to both Android and Apple smartphones.
Many manufacturers began releasing their own smartwatches with their own smartphone based apps that would link and communicate with their own brand of smartwatches. Samsung and Apple being the most successful with their own smartwatch operating systems, although they were very buggy. Samsung released a new version of their Tizen operating system to their Samsung Watch 3 models which improved the battery charging time, but disabled all the bio functions. They didn’t offer a solution for the problem and the Watch 3 owners were left with a watch that was only partly functional. This angered many owners of the Watch 3 after spending several hundred of dollars to buy a smartwatch only to have many of the functions disabled by a buggy release of Tizen.
Why Buy a Smartwatch now?
Android Wear has evolved into the latest Wear OS 4 operating system. Samsung, hoping to regain confidence with their buyers, has fully adopted the new Wear OS 4 into their latest watches. Many watch manufacturers have abandoned their propriety operating systems and have elected to release their new watches with Wear OS 4. Or they made an upgrade path to allow existing owners to upgrade and change to Wear OS 4.
Now, after 20 years of trial and error, we finally have an operating system which will be used universally among most smartwatch manufacturers.
The new version of Wear OS 4 has all the features that was offered in other smartwatch operating systems, plus more. The experimenting is finished, no more trial and error, finally we have a workable smartwatch operating system.
How to upgrade the operating system on your smartwatch?