The hotly anticipated reveal of Samsungs latest Smartwatch UI based on the new “unified platform” created by adding Tizen optimisations to WearOS finally took place overnight at Samsung’s online MWC event. For those hoping for a stock Wear OS experience, or for an in-depth look at the UI you’re going to be disappointed.
What we did see was a brief highlight of certain interoperability and UI features in a series of short videos. One UI Watch is unmistakably a Samsung UI, which we fully expected with the announcement of Google dropping their no skinning rules for Wear OS. Check out Samsungs videos below.
Seamless Experience
It’s unclear how much of this is exclusive to Samsung and their ecosystem or if the seamless experience style features will be available on other Wear OS devices or only with Samsung Watches paired with Samsung phones, we fear the latter.
App Ecosystem
It’s been largely speculated that the reason Samsung made the switch to WearOS was that they couldn’t get 3rd party developers to develop for Tizen on mass. Samsung is defiantly leaning into the WearOS app catalogue, even if they don’t want to formally acknowledge what’s under the hood.
Watch Face Design Tool
Custom watch faces is a significant part of the interest in Smartwatches, in order to make creating your very own watch face easier Samsung has developed a new watch face design tool. It’s unclear if this will be a developer-only tool or if any user can create and upload their own.
Of course not new Watch UI would be complete without a watch to run it on, Samsung’s finally tease was a coming soon for the next Galaxy Watch.
For now, that’s it, Samsung is pushing with the Galaxy Watch and One UI Watch branding and almost ignoring that Wear OS is under the hood. At this juncture, it’s still unclear if Samsung joining the Wear OS hardware ecosystem will make a difference to Wear OS as a platform.
Samsung has successfully kept itself apart from any other Wear OS hardware OEM. Heating up these Smart Watch wars are.
