Does any one remember Android wear? The promise of Google to take your concentration from your phone screen to the world around you. Android Wear is still waiting for its new version, due in the new year, but as current partners fall away there is a way to save your watch from obsolescence – AsteroidOS.
French computer science student Florent Revest and a team of developers have announced a truly open source smart watch operating system. AsteroidOS is based on Linux and is designed to be as easy as possible to port to almost any hardware. A major plus being that due to its open source nature, developers and companies alike are free to make any changes they wish – unlike Android Wear.
Although this is only version 1, it has taken a team of developers more than a year of work to get this far. AsteroidOS appears basic but is already a very capable system, with several default system apps such as:
- Agenda: Schedules a set of events to remember
- Alarm Clock: Schedules an alarm at a specific time
- Calculator: Quickly computes simple calculations
- Music: Remotely controls your phone’s music player
- Settings: Configures AsteroidOS to your needs
- Stopwatch: Measures an elapsed time between two taps
- Timer: Vibrates after a specified amount of time
- Weather: Shows following days’ weather forecast
AsteriodOS Partners
Jolla, who created Sailfish, have already demonstrated their technology running on top of AsteroidOS so the future certainly looks bright for the open source upstart. Florent’s main goals for the near future are aiming at “expanding battery life beyond its current limitations and supporting more sensors.” In the long term the team aim to work with more companies to develop integration with a large array of hardware platforms.
Ready made builds are available for the OG LG G Watch, the G Watch Urbane, as well and the Asus Zenwatch 2 and the Sony Smartwatch 3. If you are a budding dev and want to have a crack at porting AsteroidOS to your smartwatch, head over to the groups wiki page and have a look through the guide. The full release information for AsteroidOS can be found on Florent’s GitHub page.