14 DAY TRIAL // After Google officially announced the first Android Wear watches, the LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live, both products where immediately made available for pre-order.
The first one actually started shipping out to early adopters a few days ago and it didn't take long for one eager developer to create a custom ROM for the watches.
That’s not really a surprise since the smartwatches run on Android software and people have been tweaking and installing custom ROMs on their Android phones and tablets ever since it came out for the first time.
So if you’re not really satisfied with what Android Wear is capable of bringing to your table, it’s quite comforting to know you can have the opportunity to change the software the watch comes with.
Anyway, the first custom ROM to emerge is dedicated to the LG G Watch. Member Jakeday of the RootzWiki forum posted the Gohma custom ROM, promising improved battery life, reduced lag between screens, improved overall performance, increased vibration intensity and other cool surprises.
But don’t get your hopes up. Installing the Gohma on your LG G Watch won’t bring about an entirely different user experience, like in the case of CyanongenMod or Paranoid Android.
Actually, this custom ROM isn't anything fancy and just aims to bump up the performance of the device, in case you get your watch shipped in and you’re not happy with the way it behaves.
The improvements promised by Gohma are pretty important, especially the battery life extension feature. The “other surprises” part is what really gets us excited about this particular ROM.
The installation process differs a little bit from the usual Android ROM processor. For starters, you won’t be needing to flash the device into recovery.
So to get Gohma onboard, all you need is open the ZIP file on your computer and then carefully follow the instruction provided in the additional .txt document.
The new software doesn't actually replace Android Wear per se, but just roots the device and changes some key files. So next time Google pushes out a soft update for the product, your tweaked smartwatch should be hit too. Although the ROM might need a quick re-install at some point.
For those of you who don’t remember, the LG G Watch comes with a 1.65-inch LCD IPS display that offers 280 x 280 resolution. The watch is kept alive by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor fitted with 512MB of RAM and 512MB of internal storage.
The watch is currently shipping out and it can be yours if you’re willing to throw $229 / €167 at LG.