New wearables will receive Wear OS updates until 2031.
Yesterday’s Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event brought a slew of new product announcements, including two new wearables. And if you are planning to get the Galaxy Watch 9 or Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 smartwatch, you can rest assured that Samsung will help it stay on your wrist for a long time.
As spotted by 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. GoogleSamsung’s latest smartwatches will be the first to receive five years of Wear OS updates. Compared to something like a phone, which manufacturers perceive as an expensive and often long-term investment, wearable devices don’t tend to get the same length of support. But Google is gradually working on its wrist engagement issues. This year’s watches get an extra year compared to the Galaxy Watch 8, which was only guaranteed four years of operating system updates. A Pixel Watch currently comes with three years of updates.
As confirmed SamMobileThe Galaxy Watch 9 and Watch Ultra 2 will be supported with operating system upgrades through 2031, starting with Wear OS 7, bringing them in line with Samsung’s five-year commitment to security patches (which older wearables also receive). Whether anyone will actually keep their smartwatch that long is another question, but at least the option is there.
ICYMI yesterday, this year’s Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event revealed that the Galaxy Watch 9 gets a 20% battery boost over its predecessor, while the Watch Ultra 2’s screen gets up to 5,000 nits of brightness, up from 3,000 on the previous model. Both also get a range of new AI-based health tracking features, and if you want to know how the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 fares in the wild, you can read our impressions after a week of use.
