Most smartwatches out there act as companion devices. Meaning that they need to be paired up with a smartphone or a tablet in order to tap into most of its features. As much as we would want our wearables to be more powerful and capable of doing a lot more, that’s simply a limitation that doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon. Recently Google launched Android Wear, a new SDK for wearable devices. LG and Motorola are both building smartwatches on it. While they look refreshingly different from the current crop, it appears that Android Wear smartwatches won’t really be different from their rivals at least initially.
In detailing what developers need to know about Android Wear, Android Engineer Sagar Seth gives a variety of tips that developers should keep in mind when building for Android Wear powered smartwatches. Seth says that developers should focus on using landscape images, notifications with image in the background and really harnessing the power of Google Now voice commands.
Though he also mentioned that developers need to remember that they won’t be building full-fledged applications for Android Wear, where the application would sit on the device itself. It won’t. It would simply be notifications that would make information available when the user needs it to be. This means that Android Wear smartwatches would also need to be hooked up with a mobile device.
Was this to be expected or is this really not what you would have imagined Android Wear smartwatches to be like? We all love the idea of having a smartwatch that can do all this on its own, but perhaps we’ll have to wait for a bit before they become a reality.
Filed in . Read more about Android Wear, Google and Wearable Tech.