Keep on OS 5, can support track streaming battery moment to your monitor with Bluetooth LE audio

One of the many significant benefits of owning a smartwatch is that you can play game tracks, podcasts, or audiobooks from your favorite streaming products while you exercise, all from the comfort of your phone at home. All you need is your smartwatch, some Bluetooth earbuds and access to some audio content (either downloaded over the network or streamed if your monitor supports mobile data). Using your smartwatch’s audio content to play games as it tracks your activity actually takes a toll on its battery, too, but thankfully the next Wear OS 5 update adds something on that front thanks to Bluetooth LE Audio. Can bring improvement.

Recently, when you wirelessly send some audio from your smartwatch to some earbuds via Bluetooth, that audio data is transmitted over the Bluetooth vintage connection between your smartwatch and the earbuds. In contrast, your smartwatch sends data to your smartphone over Bluetooth LE, where LE stands for Low Power. As its name suggests, Bluetooth LE is a low energy version of Bluetooth radios. It is specifically designed to connect to IoT units that have low batteries so that they can remain powered off for days, weeks or even longer on a single charge, depending on the frequency of data transmission.

Until recently, it was not possible to transmit audio data over Bluetooth, as there was no standardized strategy for doing so. On the other hand, with the rising price of Bluetooth hearing aids comes the demand to enable audio data transmission over Bluetooth LE to increase the battery capacity of these remarkable accessories. The business framework behind the Bluetooth standard thus created Bluetooth LE Audio, which is made up of Bluetooth profiles and lines ready for streaming audio over Bluetooth LE (hence the name).

Initial support for Bluetooth LE audio was added in Android 13. LE Audio unicast support was previously added, allowing audio streaming from a supplied device to a single sync tool over Bluetooth LE. Backup for LE Audio AD, which allows to stream audio from a source device to multiple sync devices over Bluetooth LE, is being prepared for the next Android 15 update.

However, the OS doesn’t get the same year-end features as regular Android as it’s targeted at smartwatches rather than smartphones and tablets. It looks like the next Wear OS 5 update — which will follow Android 14 — will be the first Wear OS late fall to support Bluetooth LE Audio, at least LE Audio Unicast.

When I was digging around during the Wear OS 5 Developer Preview release earlier in May, I realized an untouched story in the ClockworkSettings app meant that a dedicated “LE Audio” option would be added to Bluetooth settings. It’s most likely that, when a Wear OS 5 smartwatch that supports LE Audio is connected to some earbuds that support LE Audio — such as Samsung’s untouched Galaxy Buds 3 — an LE Audio toggle will appear. Will let us know if the customer will enable this feature.

<fable identify="pref_bluetooth_leaudio">LE Audio</fable>

Even though there are a handful of earbuds and headphones that support LE Audio, there are no smartwatches that support the feature, at least not yet. Bluetooth LE Audio relies on the options found in model 5.2 of the Bluetooth core specification, so technically, any Wear OS smartwatch that supports Bluetooth 5.2 should be able to support LE Audio. On the other hand, things are not so simple, as the smartwatch manufacturer may need the assistance of the vendor of the product’s Bluetooth chip for firmware assistance, not to mention all the testing, verification and certification steps that this type of firmware entails. to do. Will need to be replaced.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Google’s next Pixel monitors support 3rd order Bluetooth LE audio, although there haven’t been any leaks so far to suggest that’s the case. Google’s hardware tournament day by day should shed light on what features the untouched Pixel Monitor 3 order will bring, and we’re hoping LE audio support is one of them.