The watches have been with us for hundreds of years: there are sand, sun, others more conventional: pocket, wrist… until today. But times change and with them technology continues to advance: the time has come for smart watches. This time Google has been in charge of giving “vidilla” to this type of device thanks to its Android Wear operating system.

Some of you may wonder: how and when will we enjoy this technology? Well, the LG G Watch and Moto 360, the first smartwatches that will work with this operating system, are expected to arrive on the market, in addition to a Samsung model that will be launched later and with which it hopes to have great success, breaking new ground. with these types of devices, or at least if the vice president of the company, Hankil Yoon, believes it, as he recently announced in an interview. Anyway, while that moment arrives, Google will continue working to improve the Android Wear SDK, its previous version.

Although its presentation date is unknown, due to "previous experiences" (Galaxy Fit and Galaxy Gear), Samsung could offer us different versions simultaneously.

According to some sources, its design could be rectangular, turning out to be very similar to Motorola's SmartWatch, as some images that have been released have shown.

We could say that Android Wear is a version of Android 4.4.2 Kit Kat that has a touch interface adapted to Smartwatches to allow us to see and interact with notifications and contextual information, in addition to being able to request information and perform actions through our voice. In principle, you will not have your own applications installed.

Today, the Android Wear Preview supports watches with a round screen that are equipped with a resolution of 320 x 320 pixels, and if we talk about a square screen we will say that they have a resolution of 280 x 280 pixels. All we can tell you from now on are simple assumptions, but everything seems to point to the fact that they will present a dual-core processor, accompanied by 512 MB of RAM and 4 GB of ROM, in addition to Bluetooth.

Context cards and notification list

From the main Android Wear window we can see the time, an access to start the voice control and also our list of notifications and context cards with the information that interests us at that time, for example: sports results, the weather, flights, etc, in addition to a sports application to find out, for example, our loss of calories, among other functions. We just need to scroll vertically and to the left through the device to see all the information and actions of the cards and notifications. Scrolling to the right removes a notification or a specific card from the list. Notifications between our Android terminal and Android Wear will always be synchronized, that is, if we discard them from one of the devices, it will be automatically discarded from the other.

Notifications will also allow us to interact with them so that we can reply with predefined messages or even by voice to a message, obtain information on how to reach a destination that interests us and also control the music player of our Android.

To properly support Android Wear, developers will only have to add more pages to a notification, implement voice inputs and stack notifications from the same application. Some notifications can also be opened from the application of our Android Wear so that as soon as we unlock our Smartphone, the open notification appears as if we had carried out the action from our own phone.

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Cards and actions that require our "approval"

Above we talked about information and notifications that come from our Android without the need for a request. That said, to carry out actions and obtain specific information, we will have to use voice commands (pressing the "G" icon on Google and saying "Ok Google").

At this point we can already request specific actions such as creating notes, sending messages, setting alarms, playing music, identifying songs, etc. Scrolling up this view will show us the list of supported commands.

Features to come

Not long before developers will have the possibility to customize the interface of the cards, thus being able to collect the data from the sensors and display them in real time, execute activities, that third-party applications can use voice commands and also have the Ability to send data and actions between Android and Android Wear with the Data Replication API and RPC.

Availability

Those of Google still have time to add more functionality to their operating system before the official launch of the first Smartwatches, which is estimated to be next summer.