Google looks to be doubling down with Android Wear, as it has acquired start-up smartwatch OS developer Cronologics to help grow the portfolio of watches powered by Android Wear.
In a blog post on the Cronologics website, the company confirmed its acquisition by Google, stating that the whole team will be moving over to help grow the portfolio of watches powered by Android Wear. Their focus? Assist with Android Wear 2.0 firmware which has been delayed by Google until next year.
The acquisition of Cronologics is a smart move according to most industry insiders, as the company was founded by former Google employees and has already designed, crowd funded and brought to the marketplace a very high end Android Wear smartwatch called Cronologics CoWatch (pictured above).
Cronologics can certainly build, design and custom Android wear into a high end smartwatch. Let’s hope that with the acquisition, and as the teams come together, that they can refine Android Wear and spruce the software updates to ensure we get some more (and better) smartwatches out to the marketplace.
The details on the exact financial arrangements and agreements were not disclosed by either Google or Cronologics but it will be interesting to see what happens with Android Wear in 2017.
I bought a Samsung Gear S2 which is great, but it doesn’t have a killer purpose. The main thing I find it sort of useful for is step counting and vibrating alerts to prompt me there’s something to look at on the phone. I don’t think this is a failing of this watch, I think it’s a failure of the smartwatch category in general to be truly useful. Will be interesting to see if this changes next year or if the market will die. Many manufacturers have already pressed pause.
by the time they release 2.0 its already dead