Newsletter
Android Wear launched a little more than a year ago officially after having been unveiled at Google’s annual developer conference, and in that time since launch it’s been getting upgrade treatments from the team at Google to make it more of a robust and full-featured smartwatch platform. The most recent release, Android Wear 5.1, brought in some new features and functionality that made using the interface more pleasing for many consumers who had already owned an Android Wear device. The capability to draw emojis on screen for example to send them in a message, or the included feature to turn on ambient mode for every single app installed on the watch. These were great additions.
Today Google is announcing a new release of Android Wear though which introduces yet another functionality that helps to bring the software a little bit more forward: Support for interactive watch faces. More than likely there are quite a few people who have already been waiting on something like this to come through, and if that’s the case than today is your lucky day because it’s finally happening. This is the biggest changes in the most recent new software release for the platform, and there are already a collection of different interactive watchfaces available in the Play Store which Google has partnered with to bring them to life. The Bits watch face in particular for example will allow users to configure different buttons on the homescreen of the watch which, when tapped, will open up “at-a-glance” details of information like emails or calendar events. (You can see the image of it below)
Interactive watch faces are sure to delight plenty of users, but just like anything else they’ll need some variety before they really take off, and Google can’t work closely with every single developer, which is why they’re releasing an interactive watch faces API so developers can design and build, then release their own creations to the Play Store for users. Google is also adding Translate support in the new release with support for up to 44 languages. Users will be able to easily speak to their watch and have their words translated, which they can send off with a flick of the wrist. Recipients can then send a message back in their own native language in the same way the message came in, and then users can flick their wrists again to translate the incoming message. These changes are supposed to be rolling out to users over the next few weeks.
