Wear OS 5 could improve your watchs music streaming battery life with Blue

[elboriyorker]

Wear OS 5 could improve your watchs music streaming battery life with Blue

• Google is preparing to add Bluetooth LE Audio support to the upcoming Wear OS 5 release.
• Bluetooth LE Audio enables streaming music over Bluetooth Low Energy, which requires less power than streaming over Bluetooth Classic.
• The feature might be supported by upcoming smartwatches that launch with Wear OS 5, but we dont know which ones yet.

One of the many benefits of owning a smartwatch is that you can play music, podcasts, or audiobooks from your favorite streaming services during workouts, all while leaving your phone at home. All you need is your smartwatch, a pair of Bluetooth earbuds, and access to some audio content (either downloaded locally or streamed if your watch supports mobile data). Using your smartwatch to play audio content while its also tracking your workout can be really heavy on its battery, but fortunately, the upcoming Wear OS 5 update could bring some improvements to that front thanks to Bluetooth LE Audio.

Currently, when you wirelessly stream some audio from your smartwatch to a pair of earbuds over Bluetooth, that audio data is transmitted over a Bluetooth Classic connection between your smartwatch and earbuds. In contrast, your smartwatch sends data to your smartphone over Bluetooth LE, where the LE stands for Low Energy. As its name implies, Bluetooth LE is a low-energy version of the Bluetooth radio. Its designed specifically for connecting with IoT devices that have tiny batteries so that they can last for days, weeks, or even longer on a single charge depending on the frequency of data transmissions.




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