With the unveiling of the Apple Watch Series 5, talks about smartwatches and the like over at the Android and Wear OS camp were set off again.
Now a new report is clarifying why Google's wearable didn't pan out and why fans shouldn't expect a "Pixel Watch" or something along those lines at its October event.
Made By Google's Smartwatch Died In 2016
As reported by Business Insider (via 9to5Google), Google was supposed to announce its first-party smartwatch line alongside the Pixel and Pixel XL in 2016. Needless to say, that didn't take place.
What happened was that hardware chief Rick Osterloh opted not to go through with the wearables right before they were about to go official, and as reported, there were a lot of reasons behind the decision.
For starters, Osterloh wanted the devices to look uniform across the board. The smartwatches are also said to have had performance issues, particularly how they didn't work well with the Pixel smartphones. A former employee who worked on the project even said that syncing between the two devices wouldn't function properly.
At that, the smartwatches were canceled because the team behind them "didn't want a peripheral product to bring down the name of the Google hardware brand," a former employee said.
To boil things down, the "Pixel Watch" was real at some point, but because of a couple of problems that held it back from fruition, it's just the Made by Google smartwatch that never came to be.
Don't Expect The Pixel Watch In October
Some fans are probably hoping to see a Google-branded smartwatch at the company's October event, but according to its sources, the report also said that there won't be a "Pixel Watch" or anything like it there.
From the look of things, the Mountain View brand doesn't have any solid plans just yet for a Wear OS device to go toe-to-toe with the likes of the Apple Watch Series 5.
