It was a late arrival to the wearables party, yet Android Wear made a splash when it finally got here. Since then it has taken the market by storm and a range of smart watches have started to appear using the new OS. With brands such as Fossil and Tag Heuer wanting in on the party, there’s a lot going on in this new market.
Essentially, smart watches take notifications from your phone and display them on your wrist. By connecting Android Wear to your Android smartphone via Bluetooth, the two devices keep each other up-to-date. The watch can display incoming texts, WhatsApp messages, tweets you’re mentioned in, Facebook updates, e-mails and calls. Fortunately, you can tweak which apps can notify you, so you can tune it to what you’re doing at the time.
Smart watches also tell the time. While there’s nothing fancy about that, the dozens of designer watch faces available on the Play Store for Android Wear makes it more interesting. There are two main designs – round and rectangular – to match the shape of the watch. Simply go to the store, find a watch face you like, download to your phone and enable on the watch. That’s it.
One thing that will take a little getting used to for smart watch wearers and people around them is the ability to talk to the watch. Using Google Now, you can use voice to control what the watch does, use apps and all those good things we now use our phone for. It’s just a shame that this voice control doesn’t yet stretch to making calls. So while you can tell Google what to do and answer calls, you can’t make them yet. Pity. However, it’s one feature that is bound to come in time.
The new Android Wear update also allows for gesture control of your watch. Flick your wrist away to scroll notifications forward, flick towards you to go back.
Android Wear is already a very cool thing to use and with updates coming regularly it’s only going to get better. With several big brands already building hardware for Android Wear, the entire ecosystem is only going to get better.
Jesmond Darmanin is a technology enthusiast who blogs at www.itnewsblog.com.