Interesting they are still going with round. Most of the UI shots look awkward on a round screen with anything not in the very center getting cut off a bunch.

In some basement at Google there's a group of traumatized engineers who were flogged mercilessly until they made a smart watch UI work on a round watch face because...??? I've developed Wear OS apps in the amount of effort that it must've taken to get to a sort of alright implementation of a UI that still depends on a lot of lists of things seems crazy to me.

I was discussing this with my wife 10 minutes before I saw this comment.

watch / time / clock looks and works so much better on a round interface. notifications / text / buttons look and work so much better on a square interface.

So, use a watch on one wrist (round, good looking, etc), and a smartwatch on the other wrist (square, functional, 'computer')

There's no way you can mold the two together into one 'have it all' form factor

The round just looks better and far fewer people actively use the interface on the watch other than looking at the time or marking a workout. I think the squircle watches like Apple's look odd.

Google is an ad company. They don't actually want to lose any of the phone screen time on something with lower revenue real estate.