Audi and LG don't want to talk about the webOS smartwatch. The car company made a splash here at CES when it showed tap-to-unlock technology in the new Audi S7 using a tablet, phone, and a previously unseen LG smartwatch. The watch's user interface doesn't look like Android Wear (see the images below), and after a closer look at the watch, reporters from Android Central saw that it said it was running Open webOS.
After LG folks told me that there was actually no webOS smartwatch, I ended up talking to visibly frustrated Audi automotive security engineer Roman Kochanek. "It's a prototype," he sighed. "Some people say they saw a settings screen which says it's webOS. We're not saying it's webOS."
Well, obviously, it is a webOS smartwatch. But presumably what LG and Kochanek were trying to get across was that the companies may have no plans to release this model, for now. Kochanek said it was a co-developed prototype designed with a phone-like "secure element" so it could activate the new S7's remote unlock and start functions.
The remote-unlock feature can also let you "lend" keys to your friends' smartphones and smartwatches, Kochanek said, showing a Samsung phone that could open not only his demo vehicle, but two of his friends'. All of the devices involved need the Audi app and the appropriate security hardware.
The Audi/LG smartwatch's body is very similar to LG's existing G Watch R . The watch has Audi branding on the watch face, but an LG logo on the band clasp. The UI is like a spiral of built-in and third-party apps retreating into the distance. The apps include a phone dialer, SMS, music player, step tracker, calendar, language translator, email, voice recorder, and some things that were in Korean.
In any case, things have gotten more locked down since yesterday, when Android Authority and The Verge were both able to get the watches off of the Audi engineers' wrists. Kochanek kept driving the watch back to its remote-unlock and remote-start functions, both of which are cool but not what everyone's going crazy about: a full-scale smartwatch OS with a clearer and more usable interface than the pervasive and disappointingly confusing Android Wear.
Kochanek said that the Audi remote-unlock function will come to more smartwatches than this one, as long as they have NFC and the appropriate security hardware. As for the LG webOS smartwatch line, which The Wall Street Journal says is a real thing, we might learn more at Mobile World Congress at the end of February.
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