Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Android Wear: State of Wearable Tech!”.
Hey what is up guys, mkbhd here and if you’d asked someone at the beginning of this year, what they thought this would be the year of half of them, probably would have said the year of 4k and the other half probably would have said wearables. And i already did a video in early 2014 about the state of 4k and where that sits right now, so i’ll have that linked right below, if you haven’t seen that already so might as well, now take a look at where we stand with wearable tech. Now this video comes at an interesting time because of recent announcements that i’ll get to in a second. But i recently did a video on the top 5 wearable tech and pebble is the king for like now for right now. Obviously, pebble has been very successful since their breakout kickstarter campaign, as a company and they’ve established themselves as pioneers of the smartwatch. They took another step forward with pebble 2.0, so the new app and the new watch firmware, and they now have pebble steel. So the metal, housing and the much more premium feel and the new wristbands and they keep the ink display in the app store and all the stuff that pebble has been good at they’ve, gotten better at all of it. But even if you’re pebble right now and you’ve improved on everything and you locked down your technology and it’s great, you still got to be freaking out at least a little bit after google’s announcements yesterday that pretty much changed everything about wearable tech. So yesterday google announced in case you haven’t already heard android wear, which is a version of android designed specifically for wearables or wearable tech.
Now android 4.4 kitkat, as we already know, was designed specifically to have lower system requirements which will let it work on lower end devices like smartphones and also appliances, like refrigerators and even cars, but android wear is designed specifically for wearable tech, mostly smart watches. So before this, if you wanted to build a smart watch, you could do it one of two ways: number one: you could build your own operating system from scratch and a couple of manufacturers actually did this. So we saw this in the sony smartwatch 2. We saw this with tizen with some samsung watches, and we saw this with pebble.
They built their own os and api from scratch just to work with the form factor on your wrist, or you could do with the number two way, which is to modify an existing operating system which, in this case, would be android the open source os, and we Saw this with the samsung galaxy gear, the first version was a modified version of android very heavily modified, but they had to take that existing os and change it up now, watching all the videos and promo material for android wear. It’S clear that this was designed with the smaller display in mind. It’S designed to be on your wrist. It’S designed to be glanceable information, swipeable interface, it’s very pretty nice and clean elegant, and it’s got a whole lot of information at your fingertips and also a whole lot of integration with google. Now we were waiting to see something like this sooner or later from google. Even though we didn’t exactly know what it would look like so now that we have this new version of android wear, when are we going to start seeing devices that use it so motorola and lg are going to be launch partners uh, but in very different ways. So lg, i guess, being the less interesting of the two. It’S going to be building a more traditional smartwatch style square display smartwatch, just with android wear, instead of a modified or custom os, and it’s going to be a lower-end smartwatch, probably with a lower price tag and less features.
But the much more interesting launch partner, which i think a lot of us are eyeing right now – is motorola and their moto 360 smartwatch. This is the round smartwatch that google showed in the android wear promo video and it’s something to be a lot more proud of. So this is an absolutely beautiful. Looking smart watch, i mean this thing is insta by territory. For me right now, i cannot wait to get my hands on hardware like this. It’S beautifully designed, it has some great looking watch faces and it makes really all the right design decisions uh to look like a regular watch. The pebble does not look like a regular watch. It’S a rectangle and you can do your best with watch faces to make it look more elegant and make it look a little bit more like a regular watch, but no matter what you do, you’re not going to be fooling anyone into thinking that that’s a traditional Watch and that matters to a lot of people, the moto 360 is honestly a work of art at this point to do what it does and i’m not seeing any weird charging ports or batteries or cameras or anything unnecessary.
It does its best to look the part of a really nice watch and i’m sure the price tag will reflect that when it’s released this summer, but i have my eye on that for sure now. The only thing i’m actually concerned about here with these new watches is the fact that they have lcd displays, there’s a reason why a lot of smart watches have gone with e-ink displays recently, it’s because that’s a much more natural feeling technology. It’S like looking at paper. Almost, and that also gives you the ability to have much longer battery life and constant on watches. So if you want to check the time really quick, all you have to do is look at it and it’s already there. You don’t have to shake it to get it to appear or do some sort of fancy gesture to get the lcd to turn on that.
Doesn’T feel very natural, very watch-like, so if moto 360 can nail down outdoor visibility, battery life and convenience for checking the time, so it doesn’t feel unnatural. You can have all my money. Also android wear is still android, so it’s still the open source os. So it’ll likely be able to talk to any android smartphone uh, unlike some of the other modded android watches, which would only really talk to a very small number of devices.
So if you have a device, that’s not a galaxy device. If you have a nexus or a moto x or whatever android device, you have, maybe even an ios or windows phone device in the future, you’ll probably be able to use this new watch, and also can we talk about the fact that this watch is a circle? Not a square like every literally every other smart watch ever has been a square. That’S why we thought flexible displays were the answer to making these rectangular things less bulky on our wrists. We thought we had to curve them around our risk, but really i’m excited to see what developers do with a circle. Now that we have a circular display, i mean: where else do you see circular lcds out there, so i’m excited to see what developers do with this sdk, making their apps play with that correctly, that odd resolution and viewable area on it. But ultimately, this is the first circular display that i’m actually decided to be excited about. So there you go, that’s android, wear and now we know exactly what the future of wearables at least smart watches are gon na look like and it’s looking pretty dope, not gon na lie.
Uh apple. I hope you took notes, so i’m keeping an eye on apple. I’M keeping an eye on motorola, i’m keeping an eye on lg, keeping an eye on pebble, keeping an eye on google. I o nexus smartwatch combo, anyone that would be nice uh, keeping an eye on all the other guys who are making smart watches before this with modded versions of android, because if we can go from this to this in three months, imagine where we’ll be in three Or four more uh, so that’s pretty exciting stuff to think about either way. Thanks for watching catch you next time later peace, you .