Huawei's Android Wear watches are considered to be the best of the Android Wear pack, if you discount the Moto 360, and the Chinese OEM makes not only smartwatches but also smartphones and fitness bands -- so the company has its reach in a number of mobile areas. Huawei has even given an extended warranty for Huawei Watch owners, a sign that it wants to court the American consumer and make more inroads into the US market.
Android Wear, though, has held Huawei's success down in the smartwatch sector due to the fact that Huawei's watches, outside of design, haven't stood out with the large offering of Android Wear smartwatches. With the company declaring that it would sit out making another Android Wear smartwatch for 2016, you'd assume that Huawei would not make any new smartwatches this year.
And yet, you just might be wrong. A new report says that Huawei's next smartwatches could run Tizen instead of Google's wearables platform, Android Wear.
The source, The Korea Herald, says that "Huawei has recently joined hands with Samsung, a leading Tizen alliance member, to deploy the operating system in its next smartwatches." A Samsung official in the same report said that
Huawei was looking for an OS other than Google's Android as the US firm had not been very collaborative.
We don't know what "collaborative" means here, but we can only assume that it refers to Huawei's desire to craft a unique software experience -- and that Google hasn't been collaborative because it seeks to have its own software experience on its own smartwatches (the Nexus smartwatches may arrive this year, though under the new "Pixel" brand instead). While Google has made Android Wear closed-source and hands-off for OEMs, Samsung's Tizen OS is open-source and the Korean giant shares the platform with Intel. Huawei would be free to design and tweak its software as it sees fit, giving consumers something different.
Now, while Huawei is looking to run its smartwatches on Tizen, there has been nothing official in the way of a formal request from Huawei -- so one shouldn't assume that the Chinese OEM has left Android Wear. What this does go to show, however, is that Huawei is looking for an alternative to Android Wear. Even if Huawei hasn't made a formal request, Samsung's willingness to increase adoption of its own operating system means that Huawei, once chummy with Google, may pull out. The future of Huawei Android Wear smartwatches at this point is in question.
