New Galaxy Watch feature confirms Samsung's wearables are still ahead of Google

Google announced Wear OS 4 last month, confirming several key features. But the most notable addition is backup and restore support, allowing you to back up your watch or copy data from an old watch to a new one. This doesn’t seem like the best solution if you just want to pair your watch to a new phone without resetting the wearable.

Now, a Galaxy Watch owner running the One UI 5 Watch beta has confirmed via Reddit that the software indeed lets you transfer your watch to a new phone without resetting the watch.

“You can transfer your watch to a new phone without resetting it,” reads an excerpt of the screengrab, adding that your new phone and watch need to have the same Google account.

We hope Google promptly brings this feature to the Pixel Watch, as the Wear OS 4 backup and restore feature seems more limited and ostensibly still requires a watch reset.

It’s a massive annoyance to have to reset your watch if you want to switch to a new phone. In fact, Features Editor Rita El-Khoury bemoaned this problem on Apple and Google-powered watches last year, noting that Fitbit had already solved the issue. So fingers crossed that Wear OS gains this Samsung feature too.