Wear OS smartwatches can now navigate independent of your phone

Show me where I'm going now: Smartwatches with Wear OS 3 can now guide their owners without a paired phone. This is also the case with the Pixel Watch (pictured). — Photo: Google LLC/dpa

BERLIN: Until now, when navigating with a smartwatch that runs on Google's Wear OS operating system, you needed to have it constantly connected to your phone for the navigation to work.

But with the Wear OS 3 update, any watch with both a GPS receiver (which most have) and cellular data (which only some have) let you leave your watch at home when you're cycling or walking a new route.