Google’s smartwatch operating system, Android Wear, is on its third major revision, and this time it is a coherent and useful platform that does what a smartwatch does best – handle notifications – making it the best platform out there.
Android Wear watches are only compatible with Android devices with version 4.3 Jelly Bean and up. Pairing the two is easy. The Android Wear application downloaded from Google Play handles the setup.
Turn the watch on, note the name of it and find it in the list of devices inside the Android Wear app. Hit yes to pair, let it sync for about a minute, and you’re good to go.
Using it
At its heart, Android Wear is all about cards. Cards can be apps, notifications, information, controls and interactive tiles. They pop up as and when required, for glanceable information and more.
A notification, for instance, can display a small snippet of information such as an email subject and sender. Tapping on the email allows you to read the whole thing. A swipe to the left and you can archive the email or reply to it via voice, emoji or canned answers.
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| Dismissing notifications is easy, as is getting them back if you swipe them away a little too readily. Swipe up to reveal the undo button for the last one dismissed. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
Navigating Android Wear is simple. Swipes to the left for more, to the right to dismiss or go back, up to scroll and down to hide. Tapping the watch face brings up the app launcher, new for Wear 5.1, with a small list of apps. Swipe to the left to bring up a list of recent and favourite contacts to send them an email or a text, or call them, then once more to talk to Google Now.
Users can also just say “OK Google” to the watch to fire up Google Now for voice searches or commands for setting timers, making notes or launching apps, for example.
A palm over the face puts the watch to sleep, as does a press of the button if there is one. Wrist-flick gestures can also be used to scroll up or down through cards without needing another hand.
Connectivity
Android Wear 5.1 introduced the ability to connect to Wi-Fi direct from the watch. Wear mirrors the connections on your smartphone, pulling Wi-Fi passwords and networks so there’s no need for manual setup.
When out of range of Bluetooth, the watch can automatically switch to Wi-Fi to connect to the phone as long as it has internet access. It works both across the same Wi-Fi network and remotely over the internet using Google’s servers, which means notifications, searches and any other function works even when not in the vicinity of the smartphone.
It works reasonably well, with little lag over a local Wi-Fi network, but the handover between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi isn’t the smoothest, taking around 20 seconds. It is only noticeable if you’re trying to use the watch at the time.
Android Wear can also store music from Google Play music on a smartphone and connect directly to Bluetooth headphones to play it back. Typically up to 4GB of music can be stored, either from playlists or albums and browsed through album cards. Syncing the tracks over Bluetooth takes a while and hits battery life quite hard, meaning that doing it overnight while charging is recommended.
Wear 5.1 now includes a lockscreen, which replicates Android’s pattern lock and is meant to kick in when the watch is taken off your wrist. I have had issues getting it to work on certain watches.
Notifications
The primary function of any smartwatch is to display notifications from a smartphone and Wear does it best out of any smartwatch platform, including the Apple Watch, Pebble and Samsung’s Tizen.
The way Wear connects with Android on the smartphone means any notification shows up if you want it to, without the developer of the app needing to do anything.
If the developer has added quick actions for the notification, they show up, too, while small extensions can be made to the app to provide more options on the watch.
The card interface is perfectly suited for displaying notifications. New ones crop up at the bottom of the screen with a small snippet and can be expanded. It means they’re ever present unless dismissed, with the latest one shown first, which makes triaging notifications easy and fast.
Apps you don’t want notifications from on the watch can be blocked, turning it into a filter to prevent overload. Wear also obeys Lollipop’s “none, priority or all” notification schemes or KitKat’s silenced mode, depending on what version of Android is running on the connected phone.
Android Wear has no keyboard as standard, instead relying on canned answers such as “I’m on my way”, voice dictation or emojis. Voice dictation works well even in relatively noisy environment, but is difficult for complex messages. Emojis are often the best way to respond, either picked from a list or by Google recognising a finger drawing of what you want, which works surprisingly well. All responses require a solid data connection on the smartphone.
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