Samsung may be one of the biggest smartphone manufacturers in the world, but when it comes to their smartwatch division, the company has been less successful. While they’ve still sold millions of these devices, the OS has not always been ideal and has seen the company fall behind Apple’s far superior WatchOS. Samsung is no longer focusing on their own Tizen for their watches though and is once again teaming up with Google and its WearOS to produce a new experience that can hopefully compete with Apple’s more popular OS.
The company showed off the new OS this week where it showcased a much streamlined and user-friendly UI approach that appears far more intuitive than the current OS, while still providing plenty of support for apps to ensure continuity between a device and watch in terms of application usage.
As detailed in The Verge, the changes will see a completely redesigned Settings menu, bring it more in line with the Ui of your phone. Syncing has also been improved, so if you have additional time zones set in your clock app, they’ll be there on the watch, and blocked callers on the phone will be blocked on watches, too. Samsung is also including a new watch face design tool, which will be available for Android developers later this year to easily create new watch faces for the platform. It’s not clear yet if current Tizen or Wear OS watch faces will work with the new OS or One UI Watch, but with a dearth of options in this department, hopefully, they can work on new devices.
These new changes are certainly welcome, though perhaps worth mentioning that this UI redesign will only exist for Samsung Galaxy Watches and may not be the same approach for all new WearOS devices as Samsung has made some specific modifications for their own usage. There is no word on when this new OS will be released. Though it will likely come out with the release of the next range of smartwatches the company will probably launch, which should be later this year if previous release trends remain in place.
Last Updated: June 30, 2021
