“In the future, your watch will be able to give you directions, play you music, and show you your text messages without you ever having to touch your phone.” If you’d told me that seven years ago when I still had my old flip phone and iPod Nano, I would have thought these magical watches were decades away. But in the past two years the tech market has been flooded with smartwatches, and now a new announcement from Google I/O promises to change the smartwatch industry and bring to it a whole lot more accessibility, functionality and magic.
Android Wear, Google’s extension of Android OS for use on wearable devices, gives developers the ability to develop apps for wearables using an adaptation of the Android platform. Wearables running AW will benefit from notifications synced with other mobile devices, data transfer between wearables and handhelds, and voice actions that open up a wealth of possibilities for hands-free interaction.
In all the buzz around the release of Android Wear, the wearable that stands out of the crowd is Moto 360. Motorola’s smartwatch is the first watch using Android Wear with a round face, making it the first smartwatch to actually look the way we want it to while performing all the functions we dream of.
With the classic clean exterior of a wristwatch and a powerful Android brain, Moto 360 looks almost too perfect to be real, like a toy. Its large face spans rim to rim, except for a small piece on the bottom, which is where the drivers are housed. The beautiful default face simulates a classic, clean analog wristwatch, completely at home within the round shell. According to The Verge‘s report of the Moto 360, the watch’s round design was decided when executives asked children to draw a watch – they all drew round ones, and the shape was decided.
This beautiful watch is set to be released later this summer, and Android Wear APIs are currently available for developers to play around with. I can’t wait to get one and get building!