Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 rumoured to get bigger battery than current-gen models

The Galaxy Watch 4 is also rumoured to run on Google’s WearOS platform instead of its own Tizen OS.

Galaxy Watch Active 2 (HT Tech)

Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, the flagship wearable from the South Korean tech firm that is expected to launch later this year, is said to feature a bigger battery than its successor. A report from The Elec states that the bigger battery will come despite the watches sporting the same design and size.

Like last time, the Galaxy Watch 4 is also expected to come in two sizes 41mm and 45mm. And the battery could come from China's Amperex Technology Limited (ATL), which got temporarily banned by Samsung for the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco. It is worth adding that ATL already provides batteries for the Galaxy S21 smartphone series.

According to the report, the ATL batteries are being used as a way to reduce costs. While the smaller sized Galaxy Watch 4 is said to come with a 240mAh battery, which is slightly lower than the current generation's 247mAh, the larger one gets 350mAh, which is 10mAh more than its current-gen counterpart.

While this is for the battery, the Galaxy Watch 4 is also rumoured to run on Google's WearOS platform instead of its own Tizen OS.

According to a recent teardown of the Galaxy Wearable app by tipster Max Weinbach, there was a plugin codename called ‘water'. This, he believes, is the Samsung wearable Wear OS compatibility later.

Weinbach added that the codes also mentioned ‘merlot' which is speculated as the codename for the chipset for the two rumoured Galaxy smartwatches codenamed ‘wise' and ‘fresh'. The code names are for the Watch Active 3 and Galaxy Watch 4. He says that there was also a direct reference ‘newos' turning speculations into something more concrete.

Earlier this month, the Exynos version Galaxy S20's latest kernel source code release had a reference to a device called ‘merlot' in the Wi-Fi driver. Although the name didn't reveal a lot about the device or if it will run wearOS software or not, what's interesting is that one of the ‘merlot' references appeared next to ‘wearOS' reference, indicating that the device might be a smartwatch running Google's wearOS platform.