Google Acquires Cronologics smartwatch OS Team to further strengthen Android Wear

You are reading a story from PhoneRadar.

Android Wear as a wearable OS has not seen much of an update in the year 2016 other than a few visual overhaul. There is not much going on in the hardware side of things as well. Apart from a few new launches from companies like ASUS, Samsung, etc. we didn’t see anything new. Hence most people are of the opinion that smartwatches a product category by itself are dead. With kept aside, Google is still trying to keep things moving on their end by slowing bringing some minor improvements to the Android Wear. Earlier today, it was revealed that Google acquired the startup Cronologics.

Cronologics is a startup company founded in part by former Google Employees. They had been developing their own smartwatch OS to go with their device called the CoWatch. Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard the name CoWatch before since it is not particularly popular. But the device has some neat features like the support for Amazon’s Alexa which is a digital assistant from Amazon. So basically it allowed users to use voice commands to do basic activities like getting weather reports and playing music or get a cab and stuff like that. It was indeed a good product.

Now that the company has been acquired by the tech giant, we don’t have much info about the future of CoWatch itself. The company could keep selling it or pull the plug and focus more on the new future projects. Cronologics stated that the team still plans to stay in the wearable technology world and work on smartwatches with Android Wear 2.0 and beyond. As of now talking about the acquisition, we don’t have much info about the financial details of the purchase since they were not disclosed. However, this new acquisition could either mean that Google is trying to improve its voice assistant capabilities or bring about some major changes to the way we use our Android Wear watches.

Either way, we hope that Google will bring some noteworthy changes to the technology since Android Wear is not all that mature yet. More and more consumers will get on board only when they are offered something unique in terms of usability. And regardless of what the outcome is, it is directly going to affect the smartwatch industry majorly in either good or bad way. And coming to the competition, Apple on the other hand also has nothing new to offer from their end. They threw some new features to the existing smartwatch and called it as version two. So we hope that Apple will also come with some radical design changes in both software and hardware side by next year. Stay tuned to PhoneRadar for more info on this.

This story appeared first on PhoneRadar. Join the PhoneRadar Forums to discuss, meet experts & share your experiences. We have now launched a Hindi Website for the latest news in Hindi. Click here to read PhoneRadar Hindi