- Wear OS 6 will be released for Android watches later this year
- It’s said to get two new unannounced features: firstly, a dedicated Water Lock for Pixel Watch
- Secondly, Adaptive Charging will improve your watch’s long-term battery health
Wear OS 6 has been revealed, and it’s making a lot of changes that users of the best Android smartwatches are quite excited about. Changes to the user experience, a visual redesign, adding Google Gemini’s AI assistant to your wrist… there’s going to be plenty for wearers of the best smartwatches (that aren’t for iPhone) to get their teeth into. You can read our Wear OS 6 feature breakdown here.
However, there are two more features rumored to arrive with Wear OS 6, either on launch or as a future update.
Firstly, according to Android Authority, you can expect a new adaptive charging feature. Adaptive charging is often used for devices to extend the battery’s lifespan, preventing the battery from being over-charged too often, which can cause the battery to degrade.
Android Authority found the strings of code, unveiling a feature similar to that on the best Pixel phones: pausing the charge at 80% completion and resuming an hour before you unplug your device. Samsung watches will reportedly get a similar feature with Samsung’s Wear OS-adjacent system, One UI Watch 8.
Water Lock on Pixel Watches
Pixel Watches have a touch screen locking feature, which enables itself automatically during swimming workouts, but it can’t eject water from crevices in the same way Samsung and Apple watches can. Nor does it have a dedicated labelled Water Lock, which disables the touch screen during rainfall, showers, or baths.
Current Pixel Watches are expected to get a Water Lock feature at least, again via Android Authority’s recent examination of code in the Wear OS 6 developer preview.
The code doesn’t actually detail what this new feature will do, so while there’s always an outside chance that it will indeed eject water, it’s more likely this is an update for existing Pixel Watches, restricted to a touchscreen-locking hot key under a more logical name for dealing with wet screens.
Touchscreens are notoriously jumpy and flawed when wet, and trying to operate a watch in heavy rain or the shower could prove challenging if a water lock feature isn’t available. While this is unlikely to change the way swimming and similar workouts operate on Pixel Watches, they will at least become more usable in the rain.
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matt.evans@futurenet.com (Matt Evans)
