One of the biggest complaints from users of watches with Wear OS 3 is the low autonomy, but Google seems to be determined to solve this problem. The solution found may come from KoruLab, a company recently acquired by Gigante de Buscas that is more focused on optimizing smart watch systems.
KoruLab is a Finnish company that has a lot of experience with user interfaces for smart watches and wearable devices, optimizing them to run smoothly with limited resources while consuming as little power as possible.
The company is still responsible for Koru, which is defined as:
A declarative graphical user interface framework that provides design freedom, even on limited microcontroller-based hardware.
For this, Koru has a library of only 128 kB with extensive support for the RTOS kernel for Linux that renders graphics at 60fps on chips with Cortex M4 cores. With this, the system manages to remain in standby 98% of the time using only 128 kB of RAM updating the clock interface once per second.
See a demo of Koru UI running on a chip with Cortex M4 cores:
Koru UI framework on Cortex™ M4 from KoruLab on Vimeo.
Another ability that KoruLab boasts is that Koru can be started in as little as 500ms and put to sleep in as little as 20ms. In this way, a smart watch integrated into it can easily achieve a week of autonomy.
Finally, Koru was created with open standards such as HTML, XML, CSS and JavaScript and still supports Android kernel, NetBSD, Linux and RTOS, in addition to support for graphics in OpenGL ES, Open VG and Framebuffer and hardware accelerator ST Microelectronics Chrom-ART 2D.
The company’s founder is Christian Lindholm, a former Nokia employee, while KoruLab’s chairman is Anssi Vanjoki, who had a long-term influence on the company that created the Nokia 3310, which was famous for its long-lasting battery life and high durability. .
Antti Järvinen, country manager at Google Finland, commented on the acquisition saying:
Today’s announcement strengthens Google’s commitment to Finland and moves our Wear OS platform forward with the help of Koru’s unique low-powered user interface experience.
We hope that KoruLab will continue to improve Wear OS 3 so that it becomes an increasingly efficient system, as this is a primary factor when choosing a smart watch for many people.