While Wear OS 3 is right around the corner, gearing up to make its official debut (with proprietary One UI Watch tweaks on top) on Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 and Watch 4 Classic in just a couple of weeks, it looks like all other devices eligible for the biggest upgrade in the platform’s history will have to wait quite a bit to join the party.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, we’re talking both existing and upcoming smartwatches here, with a number of devices from the latter category apparently set to see daylight later this year running an older version of Wear OS.
Said upgrade is expected to be delivered with the help of the company’s “partners” starting in “mid to second half of 2022”, exactly as Big G mentioned when making the Wear OS 3 name official.
On the bright side, it’s certainly nice of Mobvoi to clear all the recent confusion regarding the TicWatch E3 and both the GPS-only and LTE-enabled variants of the TicWatch Pro 3, which are finally guaranteed to make the leap to Wear OS 3… eventually.
On the not so bright side, you have to feel for a company that will go up against Samsung with a new generation of smartwatches soon stuck on an outdated OS for anywhere between six months and a year. The same will probably go for Fossil’s Gen 6 lineup, which is just as unlikely to make our list of the best smartwatches money can buy in 2021.
Of course, there’s more to a robust Apple Watch alternative than “modern” software, but the Galaxy Watch 4 and Watch 4 Classic are already looking great from a hardware perspective on paper, which will make it pretty hard for these bad boys to seem like a wise buy no matter how solid the quality/price ratio might ultimately look.
