More than two years
after stepping into the world of connected wristwear, Google finally
started rolling out Android Wear 2.0. You’ll see it on watches new and
old, round and square, big and bigger, ugly and uglier. Wear 2.0 offers
many things, but this update mostly sharpens Google’s vision for
smartwatches. It makes your watch a better tool for fitness and texting,
makes the interface far easier to navigate, and puts Google Assistant
on your wrist. Most importantly, it makes everything you do with it
faster. Much faster.
It's Complicated
Google evidently realized that the best place to put
glanceable data is on the first screen you see when you glance at your
watch. Who knew?
Android Wear now includes complications: the little
widgets on a face that let you see your calendar, open an app, or add a
cup of water to your total for the day. That last one really exists, and
I find it kind of great. App developers can make their data available
to complications, and face designers can decide how to use it.
Assistant Is Listening
The future of
Android Wear aligns closely with the future
of Google Assistant. Going forward, you’ll see watches with a clickable,
scrollable crown you long-press to activate Assistant and check the
weather, send texts, set reminders, and more. Assistant responds with
little typed cards on your wrist—odd, yes, but better than having your
watch read texts aloud. I found Assistant a little slow on the watch and
more error-prone than on my phone, but it does the job.
Notifications Are Sane Again
People who like smartwatches tend to be the always-on,
hyperconnected, Type-A people. People who like that their watch buzzes
to get their attention even when their phone isn’t nearby. Wear 2.0
refines all those notifications, so that instead of a huge card that
takes over the screen you see a small icon pop up at the bottom. Tap it
and you go to your notification; ignore it and you go about your day.
Fit Is Lit
For most people, smartwatches are glorified fitness
trackers. Google Fit, which powers
Android Wear’s health capabilities,
is finally up to the task. Your watch can now detect that you’re working
out, and even figure out when you switch from push-ups to squats.
Third-party apps can read and write data from Fit, too, so if you switch
to Runkeeper you won’t lose your decade of Nike+ data. For most things,
you won’t even need a third-party app. You can just open Fit, pick
“sit-up challenge,” and go to work.
One Watch, Many Faces
Google imagines you might use one watchface for the
workday, with your calendar and a more formal clock. Then when you go
home, you swipe over and the silly face with a picture of your kid and
music controls appears. Rather than use two watches, you wear one watch
with two personalities. Once I set it up, I really liked it. I even
created a third workout face, with all my stats one tap away. I don’t
have kids, so I just used a picture of Kevin from Home Alone. I highly recommend it.
Faster Ain't Fast Enough
Virtually every single thing about Wear 2.0 is faster than
before. Apps open more quickly, notifications are more efficient, even
games feel semi-playable. But faster doesn’t
mean fast. My two watches take eons to boot, and apps like to spin a
bit before loading. Evidently Google can’t find room within the tiny
bezels for truly powerful processing.
So Many Keyboards
Google thinks smartwatches are great for texting. So
it gave you 100,000 ways to do it. You can reply with your voice, which
is good and reasonable. You can use emoji, or Google’s canned responses,
which work fine. You can scribble letters one at a time on the screen.
Or you can use the on-screen keyboard, because somehow Google decided it
was a good idea to put a 26-letter keyboard on a teeny tiny screen.
It’s more usable than I expected, but not really usable at all.
Round Watches Are Better Watches
Google won’t explicitly say so, but it clearly made Wear
2.0 with the idea that most smartwatches are going to be round from now
on. The slightly curving app drawer, the way notifications are
presented, even the watchfaces themselves are clearly made with round
screens in mind. Which is great! Round watches fit better next to that
weird bone you have on your wrist, and tend to look better anyway.
Still No Killer App
After two-plus years of watching people use Android Wear,
Google has a pretty good idea of what people do on their smartwatches.
Yet even Google doesn’t seem to know what a smartwatch’s future is. Wear
2.0 doubles down on all those things, and makes them mostly better.
What it doesn’t do is make any kind of new case for why the
non-smartwatch-owning masses should suddenly jump on board. There’s
nothing radically new here, no exciting take on the future. It’s just a
really good fitness machine, and a way to text your friends from your
wrist. That’s fine, but it’s not going to set the world on fire.
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