Samsung's Switch from Android to Tizen in the Gear 2 is All About Battery Life

When the Samsung Galaxy Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo were announced last week one of the biggest changes to the device is the fact it’s running the Tizen operating system instead of Android which powers the majority of Samsung devices including the original Galaxy Gear.  At the time of the announcement Samsung didn’t offer up any reasoning as to why it decided to make the switch to Tizen for its second attempt at wearables, but I offered up the following idea as to why: battery life.

Samsung hasn’t specifically come out and said why it chose Tizen over Android, I’m thinking better battery life may have been a factor but that’s merely speculation on my part.

As it turns out, it looks like my speculation was right on the money.  In a conversation with Business Insider last week at Mobile World Congress, Samsung’s director of product planning Drew Blackard told them that the new Gears can get up to an extra two days of battery life by running Tizen, even though they have the same size battery.  And as we all know, the original Android-powered Galaxy Gear barely made it through a single day on a charge.

Android isn’t currently optimized to run on wearable devices like smartwatches, and Blackard said Samsung didn’t want to wait around for Google to catch up.  That being said, Google is expected to release a more “lightweight” version of Android for wearables sometime this year.