Android Wear has a long way to go

Google’s new operating system for wearable devices looks half-baked, but gives a glimpse of the future, says Molly Wood.

Google has a new operating system for wearable devices like smartwatches. It’s called Android Wear and it works like a miniature version of an Android phone on your wrist.

One day, it will do a lot of things, from telling your Nest Thermostat (also made by Google) to turn up the heat because you are on your way home to reminding your television to record a baseball game. It offers a glimpse of a smartwatch future - useful and integrated with your entire digital life.

But that’s the rosy future and this, sadly, is the half-baked now. Although Android Wear is simple and familiar for Android users to operate, its overall incompleteness make it a must-have only for the truly enthusiastic tech fan.

I tried Android Wear on the $230 (Rs 13,813) LG G Watch, one of two smartwatches that run the operating system. The other is the Samsung Gear Live, which costs $200 (Rs 12,012).

The LG G Watch does little to elevate the style and wearability of smartwatches. It’s a beefy, indelicate package even though LG is trying to make the watch seem more high-fashion and possibly even appealing to women.

The watch is available with either a black band or a white band with gold accents, and you can change out its strap. The white band looks nicer in photos, but no band can diminish the sheer size of the big square watch face or its inorganic rectangular shape.
I got the black-on-black version, which looks a bit like one of the house-arrest monitoring devices you’d wear on an ankle.

The LG G Watch has no buttons, other than a reset button on the back. You operate it with taps and gestures on its 1.6-inch screen. To power it on, you place it on a bulky external charger. To start using it, you download the free Android Wear app to your smartphone (Android only) and match it to the watch using Bluetooth.

It is easy to pair the watch with the phone. But to access watch settings like brightness or airplane mode, or to power it down, you must find a paper clip, earring or SIM card ejector and tap the tiny reset button. Even worse, LG does not include a tool for this annoying - and odd - task.

LG said that the watch had no buttons by design, because it’s meant to be “always on,” and that the reset button could also be pressed with a ballpoint pen and did not require a special tool. Then again, neither does a power or settings button.

The Android Wear app is similarly unfinished. It has a simple interface, but feels as if it were meant for app developers rather than consumers.

For example, the settings screen includes an option for “Debugging over Bluetooth.” When you’re pairing with a new device, one option is, “Pair with emulator.” And one of the two separate settings menus includes an option called Demo Cards that just sends examples of Android Wear features to the watch - fake package tracking notifications, restaurant reservations, boarding passes and so on.

Android Wear seems still in the experimental stage, but this app is not labelled a beta. In fact, when I mentioned these odd features, an Android Wear product manager seemed surprised they were in the app at all. By the time you read this, they could be gone.

He said Demo Cards, though, was intentionally included to show what’s possible with Android Wear. It is a long list that includes traffic, weather and sports scores, as well as boarding passes, flight status and coming reservations and calendar appointments.
All those notifications are courtesy of Google Now, the digital assistant that scans your email, search history and location history to offer information it thinks you need throughout the day.

I’m a fan of Google Now, but it has shortcomings. For one thing, all your scheduling emails have to go to the same email address - the one you’re using for Google Now. So if you book a flight for business and send the confirmation to your work address, it might not get tracked.

Also, notifications appear inconsistently, even for things like incoming email.
That said, having Google Now notifications on your Android Wear device puts it well ahead of other smartwatches. It is rich and usually has useful information. And the notifications are subtle: Information cards simply appear, without beeping or buzzing. The same is true for notifications about tweets or Facebook updates.

The watch buzzes gently when you get new email or texts, and sounds like a ringing phone when someone is calling. But you can disable alerts for emails, and the notifications for texts and calls are useful.

The watch interface is simple: Just swipe left, right, up or down for more information, to get rid of cards or to access more features. And voice controls are a major benefit.
You can use your voice to initiate text or email messages, open apps and ask for Google Now information. For example, you can tap the watch and say “My reservations” to see coming appointments.

Voice controls depend on individual apps. LG, the maker of the LG G Watch, hasn’t updated its text message app on the LG G3 smartphone to support voice controls on Android Wear, so you can’t use your voice to respond to text messages that show up on the watch. But it works reliably with Google products: You can speak responses to Google Hangouts (Google’s app for messaging and videoconferencing) or incoming mail on a Google account.

And the voice recognition on the LG G Watch is shaky. Composing texts and emails is frustrating, and when a sentence was too long or complicated, the watch simply gave me a “disconnected” error.

Google wouldn’t provide an exact count of available apps, but said most Android apps could do basic notifications through the watch. The Android Wear app links to a curated list of about 40 apps with more advanced features for Android Wear.

But these also have a way to go before they’re truly useful. I use an app called Eat24 to order restaurant delivery. In Android Wear, the app only lets you reorder the last thing you got. And it’s hard to tell what you’re doing: I accidentally ordered $45 (Rs 2,702) worth of Indian food and had to call customer support to cancel.

Not all your daily apps may be available, either. There’s no Uber app, so I installed Lyft. On the watch, you can say, “OK, Google, call a car.” But be warned: The next thing you know, a car is on the way. The Lyft app works with one tap on the phone, and there is no confirmation screen.

Using your voice and a wristwatch to call a car to your precise location is both futuristic and really superconvenient. Android Wear presents a vision of a legitimately useful wearable future.

One thing to watch for is the intriguing Moto 360, by Motorola Mobility (which Google is in the process of selling to Lenovo), which is supposed to arrive “later this summer,” according to Google. It will also run Android Wear and has an attractive, round watch face.

But right now, there are a few too many kinks for me to recommend Android Wear to anyone but hard-core tech enthusiasts. And that’s fine: It seems Google isn’t quite ready, either.