Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Android Wear Review! (Smartwatches)”.
Hey what is up guys and capacity here and for a while the whole SmartWatch game was all about pebble and I had a pebble for a long time. But now Android wear is a thing and it’s kind of taken over the whole SmartWatch game. So let’s go ahead and take a deep dive, but what exactly Android wear is what it does and why you should care. So the entire point of smartwatches is to give you information at a glance, and these Android wear smartwatches. Do this by giving you Google now cards and your phone’s notifications on your wrist, so all of the Google now cards you’d get show up here and any app that would ordinarily show you, notifications, like messages or an email or something.
Those notifications will now show up on your wrist too, and the way you navigate through all these is with swipes, it’s all laid out in a cards UI and basically any notification that was expandable where you can tap on it or expand to get more info on Your phone, you can now tap and expand to get more info on your watch. Sometimes I gets you more information out of like a google mount weather card other times it lets you take action like play or pause music or archive an email or do something like that and your watch is connected to your phone through bluetooth. So they talk to each other seamlessly and really fast. So when you dismiss a notification on your watch, for example, it also gets dismissed from your phone pretty quickly and vice-versa, on top of all of that, it also has these customizable watch faces.
So since it is a watch or tell them the time anyway, so you glance at it and you get a bunch of different watch faces. It varies from watch to watch, so you’ll get a different set of faces, depending on which model you get, but it basically just lights up when you get a new notification or when you activate it yourself and then just for a little extra just a little extra On top, it is its own full-fledged operating system, so they also have some standalone features, most of which can be voice-activated because it does have a microphone in it. So the first thing it’ll do since it’ll talk to Google keep on your phone is it’ll. Take a note, so if you say take a note, then it will write down whatever you say in Google.
Keep next. You have reminders, so it’ll set an alarm to remind you to do something at a time or location. It also has a pedometer which I’ll talk about later in a second, but you can show your own steps. Then you can send a text or an email to anyone in your contacts list again just by dictating it, and you also have your agenda for your day. In Google Calendar and you navigate to a nearby place or location by telling it to you can set a timer or start a stopwatch for a certain amount of time, and the alarm will go off on the phone and it also vibrate. When it’s done. You can set an alarm or show all the alarms you have and again those will also vibrate on the watch and then you have your settings and then you can also start a third-party app. So there are a couple of third-party apps that are built-in, so you can just say, start tinder, and then you can just start using tinder on your phone and there are a couple of third-party apps that are available in the Play Store right now that are compatible With Android wear, they will talk to your watch and again you can literally start and open them up right on your watch and use them without even having your phone out of your pocket.
Now, even though it may seem awkward and geeky to tap your watch and then start talking to it because it is, it actually works pretty well for the most part, and I got used to swiping motions pretty fast. It also has a quick swipe down gesture from the top, so if you’re driving or something – and you don’t want it to be distracting, you can silence all the notifications until you unmute it and in my daily life. I think it’s really nice to not constantly be checking your phone in and out of your pocket to get notifications. I actually loved having the pebble for that, but I also used some of the watch’s standalone features like I talked about, for example, the timer.
I use it to set a timer for myself a couple times while cooking, just something I wanted to have it remind me of to check on something it works. Well also, just has a subtle vibration on your wrist when it’s done it’s not like jarring or anything. I also use it to send messages, especially when driving, so I literally just say: okay, Google and then dictate whatever message I want to send and the recipient and again will just get the message as if I sent it via a regular text.
Message never have to take my hands off the wheel or be distracted reminders. I didn’t use as much, but let’s say I wanted to remember something. I just say: ok, Google remind me to buy water at 4 p.m.
and then BOOM. Now we should note this is the first version of Android wear. So I see a lot of room for improvement, a lot of places, work and get better, and I don’t even really think the average person is going to like this stuff yet, but for a real geek like a tech head. Like me, this stuff is awesome. I get a ton of use out of it. The Google now cards, especially I had a Google now card with my boarding, pass a couple of weeks ago to get on a flight, and I literally scanned my watch to get on the plane instead of a physical boarding, pass that kind of stuff blows the people’s Mind sometimes, and right now, it’s still in that stage where it’s a bit of a geek toy instead of a mainstream gadget and also right now, only a couple of devices are running Android, where there’s this LGG watch, I’ve shown for the whole video, which is my Current choice and then there’s the Samsung gear live, which is almost exactly the same with a bit of a different design and they both have their weird quirks being first-gen devices like a lack of buttons on the G watch or an interesting charging cradle for the Samsung Watch the circular and badass moto 360 that is coming later this summer and I definitely think that’s going to be the one to get your hands on if you’re a regular person – and you just want to get into Android wear for the first time.
And I could also see Google glass running Android wear eventually too, but really you got to think about the downsides, the biggest downside right now it’s got to be battery life. I mean the G watch last 36 hours on battery a day and a half. If you literally don’t touch it once, but with regular use you’re using it a lot you’re checking it it’s dead by the end of the day, and you have to charge it every night which isn’t a big deal since it doesn’t die in the middle of the Day, but it’s still a bit annoying that it only lasts one day on battery and then the fact that it’s so new we have to wait for some more dedicated watch apps to hit the Play Store. I think they’ll really make it pop the apps that use it well right now that are well integrated, are phenomenal and look great and sound great and function really well, but outside of that there aren’t too many now I do have to note that the pedometer that Uses to to count your steps is actually in the watch itself.
It doesn’t seem to be using the pedometer in the phone you’re connected to and because of that, you tend to take a lot of steps by accident just by moving your wrist, and it just counts because it thinks you took a step. So if I was reaching my daily goal of 10,000 steps per day, it was because I took 900 while eating breakfast or while throwing or while brushing my teeth or whatever. It was just counting steps all the time when I wasn’t actually walking writing an essay taking notes in class. It was counting steps, so I wouldn’t quite base my fitness, routine or any goals I have on the pedometer and any Android SmartWatch at least for now, so that is Android wear it’s a little bit of a combination of like we said, Google now and your phone’s Notifications on your wrist is available for iOS at all, yet it’s not available for Windows Phone at all, yet just for people who have an Android phone and an Android wear SmartWatch. So to me, the bottom line is it’s still kind of hard to convince the masses to buy a SmartWatch, whether it’s Android, wear or the next Apple SmartWatch or a pebble or something else. It’S just people who don’t wear watches in the first place, aren’t really flocking to buy any smartwatches right now. So it’s kind of hard to tell what I would say is wait for the Moto 360 wait to check out the more high-end ones that come out. Wait for the Apple option, of course, and those that follow the Apple option and I think in the second half of this year, in the first half of 2015, we’re going to get a lot more awesome, smartwatches, especially out of this Android wear stuff, because at the Beginning of a proof-of-concept, that’s really cool looking and I think once functionality gets built in with more third-party apps and more people start to take advantage of the fact that they can build apps for the wrist.
It’S going to be a lot more awesome. So this has been my Android wear experience and review. Thank you for watching feel free to give it a thumbs up if you enjoyed it and subscribe, there’s a subscribe button below.
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