This is a very welcome change and I’m looking forward to getting it on my LG Watch Style.
It looks like the biggest change is that swipe left will take you to Google Fit and swipe right will take you to the Google Assistant feed. This is a MUCH improved system IMO, as currently, swiping either way simply changes watchface. I don’t tend to change watchface very often, so I’ve always wished to re-map these to something of my choice, but Google Fit and Assistant are probably the two things I would have picked!
My first smartwatch was the LG G-Watch, which had a rectangular face.
My LG Watch Style that I use at the moment has a circular face.
Circular watches are better. They look better, there’s way more custom watch faces designed in that style, etc.
Yes - you can make the argument that rectangular screens are better for displaying information. I think there’s some validity to that but it’s balanced out by the fact that generally nobody is reading large amounts of text on a watch, and when the data is visual (see the Google Fit rings for example) it makes no difference either way.
I would not go back to a square smartwatch at this point and I very much think Apple made the wrong choice here. Yes, they’ll continue to sell loads because Apple, but I think to really impact a market you should be able to visualize the impact of a product on what competitors do, and it seems like nobody else is interesting in following the square watch lead.
Unlocking the bootloader and running adb commands on my smartwatch isn’t exactly my idea of a fun day I used to unlock and root every Android device I ever owned, these days I really can’t be bothered.