Gadgetory

Android wear is finally here we've seen a lot of demos and we've seen a lot of hardware but until now we haven't seen how the software works on actual shipping units this is how Google does a SmartWatch edit score Android wear is surprisingly simple from the home screen you can swipe up to scroll through your notifications on any single notification you can swipe to the right to perform actions on it like navigate reply to a text message or see more detail about the weather you can also swipe to the left to dismiss the notifications and they'll also dismiss on your Android phone which is pretty convenient you can also swipe down from the very top of the home screen to mute notifications and see your battery life the last thing and maybe the best thing that you can do from the home screen is say okay google and it will bring up a google search that will let you perform all sorts of actions you can search the web you can send a text message you can set it to leave yourself a note it's basically the entire power of google now right there on your wrist the last core feature of android where is the ability to change watch faces to do that you just hold your finger down on the home screen and then you can swipe left and right through a whole bunch of different things different manufacturers will have different watch faces and on the LG G watch at least there's something like 15 or 20 of them some are pretty neat but unfortunately you won't be able to install watch faces from third-party developers yet google says that's coming in a future update setting up Android wear with your Android phone is relatively simple you need to download the Android wear app from google play and then pair it to the SmartWatch once you've approved it to accessing notifications everything that shows up on your phone also shows up on your watch within the app itself you can actually go in and set different actions for different voice commands right now everything is just using googles apps but in the future you could theoretically have the timer map to the clock you could have show me my steps map to run keeper instead of Google fit or you could even have call a car map to burrow or lift or whatever you use to get around the overall design is super clean super simple and super readable which is exactly what you want on a watch every notification shows up as a google now style card although I guess from now on we're going to have to call the material style cards with the upcoming release of Android the backgrounds are colorful pictures and they're also contextual so if somebody sends you a text you'll see that person's profile photo in the background probably the most frustrating thing about Android wear is that you can't reorder no vacations basically this watch more than anything else is a google now machine you're going to have to learn to trust google now and trust it will give you the notifications that you actually want we already know what a smart watch that tries to do everything looks like it's the galaxy gear android wear doesn't try to do everything it just tries to do the right thing just like Google now Android wear sometimes wrong about that but what it's right it's often almost exactly magically right overall Android wear is really close to what I imagine most people would want on a SmartWatch it's not too complicated it doesn't get in the way and the voice commands and voice search are legitimately great now it's just up to the hardware manufacturers to live up to it