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Port OS weekly

My new weekly column focuses on the state of Wear OS, from new developments and updates to the latest apps and features we want to highlight.

Wear OS watch brands have gotten the message: people want their smartwatches to focus as much on health and fitness as they do on intelligence and apps. Pixel and Galaxy watches have become more competitive by copying fitness brands like Garmin (or using tricks acquired from other companies like Fitbit). But they still have a way to go.

Before becoming the head of wearables for Android Central, I preferred fitness watches over traditional smartwatches, especially Garmin Watches. Now I’m focusing more on Wear OS watches, which have advantages that Garmin can’t offer. However, I also missed out on many specialized fitness tools and longer battery life when I switched to Wear OS – things that serious athletes and “regular” people pay attention to when choosing their next watch.

I spoke to my colleagues Derrek Lee, Andrew Myrick and Jerry Hildenbrand, who have all used both Wear OS watches and Garmin watches, to determine what Wear OS should borrow from Garmin to become even better. Here’s what we collectively found.

Dynamic training

Google Maps is one of the best tools on Wear OS, especially now that it offers offline maps. But what it lacks are offline downloadable courses that you can generate and follow for runs, hikes, and walks; you can only track GPX maps using a few third-party apps.

With Garmin, you can download GPX files from apps like Strava to track them, with turn-by-turn wrist-based navigation and upcoming trail turns. Or, with the Create Route tool, you drop a pin on the map, choose a starting distance and direction, and receive an automatic route that avoids inaccessible roads and uses Garmin Connect Trendline Popularity Routing. to generate a route based on popular routes. “. Then you send it to your watch.

I have to assume that Google could offer better directions or heat maps with its World Maps data for pedestrians, the same way it displays real-time traffic for commuters. Now that Google Maps adds Gemini AIit should only get smarter over time to determine the best routes. I could even imagine a Google Courses spinoff app from Maps that would allow people to create and share their favorite routes, marking them for nice hills or scenery. You can then download and track them on your Wear OS watch and compete against other runners’ segment times, just like you can on Strava. Realize this, Google!

As a side note, once Wear OS supports proper courses, it should also add the equivalent of Garmin’s ClimbPro widget for runners and cyclists, displaying the grade, distance and total number of climbs remaining for a course difficult.

Best combination with accessories

Additionally, Wear OS doesn’t work well with Bluetooth accessories wireless earphones and some exercise equipment. Any athlete who prefers the precision of a ECG chest strap or an optical armband is out of luck, except for some niche Wear OS apps with this feature; the same goes for niche tools like temperature sensors or form analysis modules.

The real problem though is serious cycling or mountain biking. Unlike Garmin, you can’t connect your power meters or speed/cadence sensors to see key data on your watch face during your activities. Given that these watches feature the latest Bluetooth standard, this seems like a no-brainer for Google.

Reaching out to more than just runners

Garmin offers specialized software for niche sports, from golf swing training and surf wave tracking to ski maps and oxygen tracking for diving. That’s a lot to ask with standard Wear OS watches, but “premium” watches like the Galaxy Watch Ultra need to expand in these areas to attract super-users.

Meanwhile, my fellow gym-goers don’t like how basic Wear OS is for strength training. The Galaxy Watch can count repetitions somewhat decently for some basic routines, while the Pixel Watch only has calories and time. The new Garmin watches have high repetition counting accuracy for over 1,000 exercises and even automatically enter rest between sets without input.

Garmin also displays animated tips for proper form, muscle maps for the impact of each exercise, and a new Garmin Coach plan for strength training on the Fenix ​​8, giving you weeks of routines that adjust depending on your abilities. In other words, Wear OS has a lot of room to grow, and it’s a much more common use case that many people would appreciate.

And yes, make the race even better

As a runner, I was excited about the Focus on the Pixel Watch 3 runningbecause it added customizable workouts with intervals, Cardio load and target loadRunning form analysis and daily training recommendations, all aligned with Garmin Forerunner tools. THE Galaxy Watch 7 added dual-band GPS, providing more precise tracking almost comparable to Garmin.

Overall, Wear OS has improved for runners, but there’s still more room for improvement. Samsung has not yet offered training load functionality, lagging behind Google and Apple in guiding runners’ long-term progress. And Google’s TL tool doesn’t have the finesse of Garmin because it doesn’t differentiate between low/high aerobic activities and anaerobic activities, which is the best way to improve your VO2 Max.

Neither Samsung nor Google offer a running power meter to gauge your effort level in real time under challenging conditions, a common running monitoring tool. More specific to Garmin, Wear OS could use a sort of recovery estimation calculator to judge how much rest you need after a workout or workout. Precursor 965The ability to track your improvement in endurance or hill scores over time.

More simply, I wish Fitbit and Samsung Health would let you track your mileage for shoes and bikes so you know when it’s time to replace a shoe or tire.

Copy Garmin wheelchair mode

My colleague Jerry Hildenbrand wrote last year about why Garmin Venu 3 wheelchair mode made a smartwatch more viable for him than other brands. It replaces “steps” with “shoots”, but it’s more than that: it focuses on “wheelchair physiology” consider that your reduced muscle mass “limits the maximum amount of aerobic energy you can produce” and that “upper body exercise generally produces greater physiological strain than lower body exercise at loads of similar work.

Garmin’s direction is laudable and rare; Most other brands, including Wear OS, have superficial or no modes for people in wheelchairs and will happily encourage everyone to do so. get up and move when some users cannot. This is why this Garmin feature is something Wear OS needs imitate.

Ultimately, it’s all about battery life

Google had to invent a Hybrid interface And make watch faces boring and low power just to prolong its Pixel Watch 3 battery life of one to two days, while the Galaxy Watch Ultra lasts three days. Meanwhile, almost all non-Wear OS fitness watches can last a week, and Garmin watches last several weeks to several months on solar charging.

These watches use basic, low-power chips that can’t handle fast applications; Wear OS is too demanding to last long at full power, especially if it starts adding Gemini tricks. So many people choose a simple, cheap watch so they don’t have to worry about charging it often, and that’s the biggest hurdle Wear OS has to overcome.

When I interviewed Qualcomm Vice President for Wearable Devices, Dino Bekishe acknowledged as much, saying the goal is to deliver “a week of battery life” either with custom RISC-V or Oryon cores. I can only assume that Google, their client, is asking for this battery upgrade to rival fitness watches in terms of strengths.

If the hardware can’t provide battery life, Wear OS should provide a better battery saving mode like that of TicWatch Pro 5 Enduro this extends the lifespan to 45 days per charge, without disabling all the features that make people want to wear a smartwatch in the first place. Because Garmin watches may not have apps, but they can still last a long time without cutting off health tracking and background data.