According to a statement LG released a little over a week ago, they promised that an update would be coming to the LG G Watch R that would basically enable WiFi on the wearable. The update is scheduled for a release in Q3 2015 which is still a few months away, but in the meantime it looks like someone managed to speed up the process in an unconventional way.
XDA developer Tassadar, with the help of IntersectRaven, has managed to extract the WiFi drivers from the LG Watch Urbane and bring it over to the LG G Watch R, thus essentially enabling WiFi on the wearable. Of course this is not an official method so there might be some risks involved in using this method, but if you absolutely have to have WiFi on your smartwatch then you can go ahead and try it out.
That being said, Tassadar does warn that there are consequences to this. One of them being that it will break over-the-air updates, so if and when an update to the watch is available, you’d basically need to restore a stock image to the wearable in order to be eligible to update. Given that the next update should enable WiFi, we suppose it does seem like a pretty decent tradeoff.
Tassadar also notes that this method has not been tested on any other device so if you want to try using the WiFi drivers on another smartwatch, do so at your own risk. In the meantime you can head on over to the XDA forums to get your hands on the files and instructions.
Filed in . Read more about G Watch R, LG, Smartwatch and Wearable Tech.