Android Wear: the age of Google smartwatches begins

Android Wear is getting a new update today that’s easily its biggest yet. Google’s introducing several new features that change how we use our watches, from Wi-Fi support to hand gestures and hand-drawn emoji. Individually, these changes are small, but collectively, they promise to make even year-old hardware seem new. They also ensure that Android Wear keeps up (and in some cases surpasses) the Apple Watch from a pure features perspective. That could become important down the line should Google’s plans to release Android Wear for the iPhone come to fruition.

Probably the most fun part of the update is the new support for drawing emoji characters. Instead of replying with a canned response or awkwardly speaking into your wrist, you can draw an emoji character and Android Wear will do its best to recognize it and convert it to an actual emoji. In practice, it ends up being entertaining, both when it gets it right, and when it fails horribly.

Running around the house trying to find your phone is basically a thing of the past, at least if you have some battery life left. The same tools from Apple, Google, and Microsoft designed to curb theft can also make your phone ring, even if it's silenced. The only rub is having to make your way to a computer, or using someone else's phone to do it. Google's taken that extra step out of the equation as long as you have an Android Wear device. A new update introduced to Google's Android Device Manager app lets you say "Ok, Google. Start. Find my phone," into your Android Wear device and your Android phone will start ringing at full volume. You can also enable the tracker by tapping a new "Find my phone" option that shows up in the Start menu after the update.

Yes, this is the 2015 edition of the Sharper Image key finder. But there are no extra apps to install, or extra things to buy. Now, just try not to lose your watch too.

Google has opened a section to the Play Store dedicated to serving new watch faces for Android Wear smartwatches. Until this new debut, which accompanies a significant software update for the Android Wear watches themselves, the only choices available were the standard ones preloaded by Google, a few extras provided by manufacturers like LG, and a few from grassroots fans who made their own. Now Google has an official development kit for new faces and a whole bunch of options already populating the store. You'll find some of the standouts below, in both their active and passive modes, and you can peruse the full collection of novelties in our comprehensive hands-on gallery.

One of the cooler things you can do with an Android Wear smartwatch is remotely control media-playing apps on your connected Android device. SoundCloud is a great example of this, using the watch to display the cover art of what you're listening to and some basic volume and playback controls. Netflix's latest Android update sounds like it would do the same, with the company promising to let you "play" videos using the watch, but it's actually much narrower in functionality.

The Android dress code, says Google, is to simply wear what you want.

In the spirit of promoting endless customization and personalization, Google is today rolling out a big update to Android Wear that sees dozens of new watch faces added to the original set plus a whole new section to the Play Store dedicated to hosting watch faces. Designs from the likes of Rebecca Minkoff and Hugh Turvey mingle with ones featuring Pac-Man and Plants vs. Zombies. An official Watch Face API is also being released to allow others to develop their own Android Wear faces, and Google anticipates an explosion in the variety of available looks and styles you can apply to your watch.

Watches are functionally boring. Their primary task of displaying the time has been figured out for centuries, which is why modern wristwatches are celebrated for their complications, the extra things they can do beyond mere timekeeping. No complication has been more fundamental or profound than the present rise of the smartwatch, as embodied primarily by Google’s Android Wear. So long as there’s a smartphone nearby, an Android Wear watch will receive notifications, control music, take notes, count its wearer’s steps, and generally be much more useful than the typical wrist-worn timepiece.

In the space of a few months, Android Wear watch designs have gone from the utilitarian LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live to the thoughtfully designed Moto 360 and now the LG G Watch R. Even for the rapidly moving world of personal electronics, the improvements between these devices and the pace at which they’re being introduced are quite extraordinary. It’s an evolution of the smart mobile device happening at revolutionary speed.

We're stood at the foothills of a very large and formidable mountain that has the perfect smartwatch at its peak. It's still very early, not everyone's sure of their footing or the right course to take, but we are all instinctively drawn toward that pinnacle. The thing is, even with all the months and maybe years standing between humanity and its ideal wrist gadget, the winners of the race are already known. Google and Apple won.

Attempts at standalone smartwatches seem to resurface every few years. There was Microsoft's SPOT, the LG GD910 Watch Phone, and the Meta Watch — to name just three in the past decade — and none of them ever amounted to anything more than an intriguing bulletpoint in the history of personal electronics. Maybe you might have passed by one on your way to buying the latest and greatest new smartphone. It's actually the evolution of smartphones into the primary computer for many people that has now created the opportunity for smartwatches to flourish.

Work on the G Watch R, says LG, began more than two years ago. This fully circular smartwatch may be running Android Wear and competing against the likes of the Moto 360 and Asus ZenWatch, but LG argues that it's the product of a long-term project rather than a kneejerk reaction. The 1.3-inch OLED screen on the G Watch is the first mass-produced round display of its kind, which is indeed the sort of innovation that takes years of planning to complete. LG has committed just as much time on the design, which has been inspired by the forms and styles of luxury cars, classical watches, and other jewelry. Set to launch in October, the G Watch R marks a legitimate step forward from the first generation of nondescript Android Wear devices.

In March, Sony said it'd stick to its own smartwatch software in lieu of joining the Android Wear party with the likes of LG, Motorola, and Samsung. Today, Sony's completely reversing that stance with the introduction of SmartWatch 3, its fifth-generation smartwatch, which has completely embraced Google's Android Wear platform. Sony intends to add a Walkman app for music playback via a Bluetooth headset along with a remote control app for stuff you're playing on another device. Don't look for much more to distinguish this device on the software front.

Check out all of Sony's new devices

Promises, promises. Asus went into this year's IFA show in Berlin with the immodest pledge of revealing the best looking Android Wear smartwatch to date. Featuring a curved 2.5D design on the front and a stainless cover on the back, its newly announced ZenWatch emphasizes style above all else. Its price also isn't bad, coming in at 199 euros, and it has a set of high-quality internal components, too — including a 1.6-inch AMOLED display, 4GB of storage and 512MB of RAM, and the same Qualcomm processor as inside the first Android Wear watches. But Asus wants to wow you with its looks, not specs.

A tan leather strap connects an Asus-branded buckle to its chunky and well polished body. Fine detailing like stitching on the strap and exposed screws in the back of the watch are borrowed from the classic watch industry. There's an elegance to the ZenWatch that would work much better if it a smaller device. As it is now, it has the dimensions of big and sporty watches but the smooth finish and style of a more refined device. That stylistic clash undermines Asus' premise of this being the most attractive Android Wear watch — the Moto 360 still seems to have more idiosyncratic character than any of its subsequent competitors.

We're expecting to hear much more on Android Wear and the first smartwatches to showcase it — Motorola's Moto 360 and LG's G Watch — at Google I/O later this month. But before the developer conference kicks off, Google is today offering another brief look at the two devices. They're featured in a dev-focused blog post that goes over just how easy it is to build apps for both square and round smartwatches.

"Designing for Android Wear is pretty different from designing for the desktop, phones or tablets," said Roman Nurik, who worked with fellow Android Wear design "advocate" Timothy Jordan to mock up a walking tour app. "Working with constraints involving scarce resources like device size and user attention means it’s more important than ever to think deeply about your ideas and iterate on them early and often."

Android's current wordmark, set in a futuristic typeface, has remained basically unchanged for as long as the platform has existed — but now, some 5 1/2 years after the T-Mobile G1's commercial release, it might be time for an update. Posted earlier this week by Twitter account @upleaks, the alleged 17-second boot animation for LG's upcoming G Watch features the usual stylings of a Google-influenced Android device — but the interesting part comes at the end, when an all-new Android word mark appears. It's entirely in lowercase and has a softer, friendlier feel than the robotic futurism of the current logo — the only questions are whether it's real, and if so, whether it'll be canon for all Android branding going forward.

During its brief ownership of Motorola, Google oversaw a revamp of that company's longstanding word mark to take on a rounder, more approachable look, so a facelift for Android's branding wouldn't be without precedent. The new Android logo — if it's real — bears a slight resemblance to the well-known branding of the Bloomingdale's department store chain. That's almost certainly unintentional, but regardless, subliminally associating Android in consumers' minds with a high-end retailer might not be a bad idea: Google is in the midst of launching Android Wear, a platform that could spawn a number of high-end smartwatches that wouldn't look out of place in a jewelers' showcase.

Until now we've been teased with tantalizing stills and rendered videos of Android Wear, Google's operating system for wearables. But today we're finally getting a look at the real thing running on LG's upcoming smartwatch. AppDated somehow managed to get hands-on time with the device at a recent event while everyone else was focused on the just-announced LG G3 smartphone. We're not entirely clear on what's being said in the video — nor how far along this version of Android Wear is. An option for filing a bug report suggests it's by no means final. But it's footage of Google's software running on a real watch, and that's what everyone's been waiting for since March.

The video reveals a fairly basic list of things you might want to check on your wrist, including alarms, calendar appointments, messages, and other conveniences like an airplane mode toggle. We also get a quick look at some watchfaces and a battery percentage indicator, but not much else. The first watches running Android Wear are due this summer, so we should be seeing much more of Google's wearable software very soon.

Motorola's upcoming Moto 360 smartwatch could retail for around $249, or so it appears from a document released today by Motorola. In the official rules for a watch-face design contest being run by Motorola, the approximate retail value of a Moto 360, the contest's grand prize, is listed as $249. Motorola hasn't explicitly stated what the watch will sell for just yet, but it likely needed to disclose its actual value for legal reasons while holding the contest. The stated price is perhaps a surprisingly low one, but Motorola has proven to be adept at doing impressive things with low-cost components. The Moto 360 is planned for release this summer and will be among the first Android Wear watches on the market, so we should be hearing more about it soon.

LG revealed more information about the upcoming G Watch on its new website. The smartwatch will come in two colors: stealth black and champagne gold. On top of having what is being described as an always-on screen, the G Watch will purportedly be both water and dust resistant. No release date has been stated yet.

The G Watch is one of the several new smartwatches that will be using Google's Android Wear, a version of the operating system tailor-made for wearable devices. Some of Android Wear's features include in-built access to Google Maps and the presence of Google Now, Google's personal assistant service. And given that the G Watch is always on, it wouldn't surprise us to learn later that it's always listening for "Ok Google" commands as well.

Samsung's product roadmap for 2014 looks an awful lot like the 2013 version. In an interview with Reuters, the Korean company's senior VP for product strategy, Hankil Yoon, says that Samsung will introduce a new Android smartwatch as well as a "high-end" Tizen smartphone this year. What's different, however, is that the watch will run Android Wear — Google's customized software designed specifically for wearables — and that the phone might actually ship this time around.

Sony, one of the most fervent supporters of the Android platform, has said it won't be embracing the smartwatch version of the software that Google recently announced. Android Wear is a customized, trimmed-down variant of the mobile operating system intended to reside on wearable devices of various form factors — starting off with smartwatches — but Sony has taken the position that it will continue to focus on its own OS, while possibly being open to Android Wear down the line. Sony told CNET that it will "continue to work closely with Google as a key partner and continue to evaluate opportunities across a number of areas," even if most of the company's efforts will be focused internally.

The SmartWatch 2 that Sony introduced at IFA last year is actually the fourth generation of its smartphone companion device, with the software gradually evolving and maturing every year. It's therefore understandable that, at least for the present time, Sony would seek to continue building on the platform it already has rather than jumping aboard a whole new one — while leaving the door open to collaborate with the likes of Google, which already has the support of other big names like Samsung, LG, Motorola, and HTC.

Eventually they just made a watch.

Motorola design chief Jim Wicks and his team had spent a year and a half designing the device that would ultimately become the beautiful Moto 360 smartwatch, but every initial result was lacking. "Every time you do one," he tells me, "no matter how awesome you might think it is, if it’s square, everyone’s just kind of like ‘ehhh...’ And you sit there and you think about making it a little bit thinner, or a little bit bigger, a little bit heavier — you work for all those things and you still get that kind of feeling. And then finally we realized we’re not going to break through that ceiling, even with our peers, if we can’t get out of the ‘eh’ zone."

Google is finally ready to say what a smartwatch should look like. Earlier today, it gave a first peek at Android Wear, a version of its mobile operating system designed specifically for wearable devices. So far, Google has shown quite a bit of what shape the OS will take when it comes to watches in particular: it imagines Android Wear running on both square and circular displays, and it relies heavily on Google Now to augment the simple swipes that control it.

In Google's vision, a smartwatch is focused on a single task at once, but is often displaying two different things. Critical information is placed on the bottom of the screen, while a contextual background usually appears above it. In some cases, rich information appears in the background too: when using a map, Google Maps will appear in the background while route information is shown on the larger bottom portion of the display.

Google has dropped a large wearable bombshell today in the form of a developer preview for "Android Wear," a smartwatch platform that works a bit like Google Now for your wrist. Now, various hardware manufacturers are coming out of the woodwork to announce their own plans to create wearable devices. LG announced first, with its G Watch due to arrive next quarter. The watch appears to be a simple, plastic square with an LCD touchscreen. In a statement, LG's CEO of mobile communications said simply that LG would "pull out all the stops in both design and engineering." LG also said it was "developed in close collaboration with Google," but stopped short of dubbing it a "Nexus" device.

Google is officially getting into wearables. The company has announced Android Wear, a version of the operating system designed specifically for wearable devices. To start with, the system is made for smartwatches, and Google is moving aggressively to make itself the key name in wearables.

There are several key features that have been announced. Of course, fitness is a key component. Google says that you'll be able to get "real-time speed, distance and time information on your wrist for your run, cycle or walk." Naturally, that means Google Maps will be built in so that you'll be able to get directions directly from your wrist.