Google has updated Android Wear to now support interactive watch faces. Google believes this will give developers more chances to individualize their Android Wear apps while also making them more useful to watch wearers. One watch face, called Bits (see here), allows you to choose from a variety of at-a-glance information, such as weather, unread mail, oe upcoming meetings. This also lessens the need for users to exit their watch face to enter an app, which could end up saving battery juice.
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In total, the Google Play store now features just over 20 interactive watch faces.
WiFi support is a feature that Google rolled out to select Android Wear devices back in April, which allowed Android Wear devices to continue to receive notifications even if the connected phone was out of Bluetooth range.
Also within the software boost is built-in support for Google Translate, the excellent language translation app{/pullquote}.
But that’s all stuff you could have done with smartwatches already-it just makes it a little more fun and accessible. And if you want to build some interactive watch faces for Android Wear, here’s the developer link you need.
Google highlights the following three interactive watch faces. Users simply have to speak into the watch, flip their wrist and then they will be shown the translation.
This isn’t a huge update to Android Wear, but it looks to be a very welcome one. When you tap on any of these, the watch face changes and brings these circles into focus. Google Translate will automatically recognize which of the two languages is being spoken. For example, Google Fit now has the ability to track more than 100 different health features as well as the ability to set daily goals and reminders.
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