But will Polar Electro produce them themselves?
Finnish fitness equipment manufacturer Polar Electro launched its first (and last) Wear OS smartwatch in 2016. Back then, of course, the M600 came out of the box with Android Wear, and while the company was committed to updating the watch to Wear OS, Google more or less non-binding towards the platform over time. These days, Polar still makes trackers and smartwatches, but with its own custom operating system. Believe it or not, the company is apparently ready for another go at Wear OS.
In an interview with Wareable, Polar Electro CEO Sander Werring said that Polar’s last smartwatch with Google’s OS came at a time when the manufacturer had to do the bulk of the work “because there was no reference at all for this type of technology on Wear OS.”
The executive believes that Google’s platform and “chipset manufacturers” (read: Qualcomm) have developed enough for Polar to have a stake in the segment. However, Werring did not confirm whether the manufacturer would produce its own Wear OS smartwatch or license them to other manufacturers as part of its ‘Powered by Polar’ platform, which offers the company’s suite of fitness tools for other wearables. The Casio G-SHOCK HBD-2000 is the first to benefit from the Powered by Polar program.
Wareable speculates (via TechRadar ) that Polar’s affiliation may be limited to third-party watches, as the company is a participant in Qualcomm’s Wearable Ecosystem Accelerator program, which brings together vendors from both the hardware and software sides. Polar has become firmly entrenched in the latter camp, not just through Powered by Polar, but its companion apps for its existing devices.
It still feels like Wear OS 3.0 hasn’t caught on yet with Google’s Pixel Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch series essentially suffocating other players like Fossil and Mobvoi at the moment. The more Google is able to let OEMs run free faster, the better.