The company may enter the smartwatch segment in 2021, CEO said – work on watch and Wear OS continues
A few months ago, OnePlus teased its effort to bring back the smartwatch, when OnePlus was a new company in the smartphone market. However, a new OnePlus Watch was hinted that the company soon rejected those claims. However, in a recent report, the company’s CEO has now clarified that the company is still working on its smartwatch. In addition, the company is also working with Google on the Wear OS platform, though this point is not entirely related to smartwatches.
In an interview to The Input, CEO Pete Lau told two inputs that the company could launch OnePlus Watch in 2021. At the moment, Lau has not shared information about the watch’s release date or specifications, which indicates that the launch will not happen so soon. Eventually, OnePlus starts informing and teasing about its new products about a month before the actual launch.
OnePlus watch with Wear OS
Before you think about something, you should know that Lau has made it very clear that the OnePlus Watch and Wear OS projects are completely different from each other. The company wants the watch to be a part of its IoT (Internet of Things) ecosystem, in which it can communicate seamlessly with TVs, phones and other smart devices. For that, the company is working with Google to make deep-system-level integration possible.
Lau said- “Wear OS definitely has room to improve”. What we are trying to do is to work with Google to improve connectivity between the Wear OS ecosystem, Android TV and Android smartphones to build this capability for better device interoperability in the ecosystem. This has been viewed very positively by Google, so this is the direction we are trying to develop, but we do not have much information on that yet from being shared.”
Lau is not confirming Google’s platform, though he is not ruling out the possibility. Why would a company operate on a smartwatch platform and not use it in any of its products? OnePlus has long relied on Google’s software products and worked with it to improve the experience. A case in point is its smartphone and smart TV.
The parent company of OnePlus came out with an OS-powered smartwatch named Oppo Watch earlier this year. The Oppo Watch uses the OS platform but some ColorOS elements of Oppo have also been added to make the experience different. It is possible that OnePlus could do this, given that it borrows heavily from the Oppo product. The OnePlus Watch can eventually run on the same Wear OS platform, but may also bring some oxygen OS elements as well.
We are now only waiting for OnePlus to make an official announcement about the OnePlus Watch. Its cousin firm Realme is also bringing two smartwatches in India this week under the names Realme Watch S and Watch S Pro.
