If you’re in the smartwatch business and were hoping that Android Wear 2 was going to turn around your lagging fortunes, first reviews indicate that you ought to be dusting off your Plan B.
The point of Android Wear, of course, is to provide a near turnkey operating system for hardware makers, freeing them up to do what they’re supposedly best at. The downside is that the smartwatch experience will be more or less generic across a wide range of hardware. To date, that model hasn’t gained a ton of traction, as none of the leading smartwatches use Android Wear.
The Verge and Cnet took a long hard look at the new 2.0 version of Android Wear. The OS now supports NFC chips and Android Pay, loses the “flat tire” on displays, improves the app installation experience, and allows “complications” (as watch widgets are called) on the home screen.
Generally, both reviews thought that version 2.0 was a marked and overdue improvement to the original, although the Verge complained about bugs, crashes, and slowness on new LG smartwatches. But is Android Wear 2.0 enough to convert the uninitiated to smartwatches?
Well, no. It brings the Android experience closer to the Apple watch experience, but as The Verge said, the OS and the LG watches “don’t change the conversation around smartwatches and don’t really give a great reason for the unconverted to jump aboard.”