The Galaxy Watch 4 is still more a Samsung wearable than a Google one

This week was supposed to be the first day of Google’s big reentry into flagship smartwatches. Samsung is back on board after years of Tizen-based wearables, with its new Galaxy Watch 4 that runs the new, revitalized Wear OS 3. It’s the smartwatch OS that merges the best of Google and Samsung’s discrete platforms together.

But there was just one issue: Google was strangely absent from the proceedings. In fact, aside from a few oblique mentions of working with Google on the software, you might have watched Samsung’s whole presentation and not even caught that the new watches were running on Wear OS at all.

On the one hand, this is extremely par for the course for Samsung. It’s practically a running gag at this point that Samsung goes...

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