We know it’s still a week or two before people will start receiving their Android Wear
smartwatches, at least for those of you that have ordered yourselves an
LG G Watch or a Samsung Gear Live. While you’re waiting you’ve probably
already read plenty of reviews and checked out people’s hands on
opinions and first impressions of both devices, and if you read any of
that before placing your order it may have ended up leading you to your
decision of which one to get. The way Android Wear works is pretty
simple and using it won’t be a difficult thing to do, but it’s always
good to have a little handle on things before hand so we’ll aim to give
you a quick rundown of how things work.
First of all, Android Wear
mirrors the notifications from the device it’s connected to. It’s as
simple as that. Past those mirrored notifications it also has Google Now
cards integrated, which you’ll get notifications for as well. This
includes things like the weather cards or even navigation info, like
routes that I use during cycling for example. Cards like that will pop
up displaying the appropriate information and then with a quick swipe to
the left you can reveal the route on a small image of the map. Swiping
right of course for any notifications will dismiss them on the watch,
as well as on the phone it’s connected to. The way notifications work
are easy and simplistic, but they may trip people up from time to time
at first. From my brief experience with the Gear Live so far, not all
notifications can be opened up on the watch, which is OK so long as you
make a point to remember which ones you can and can’t readily interact
with directly from the watch itself. Hangouts for example will allow you
to tap on those mirrored notifications and read most of or all the text
within a given message and even a small portion of the prior messages
within that thread, and the ability to reply to it afterwards all
through the voice typing on the watch. G+ notifications however will
simply open up the app on the phone for you to interact with it if you
want to leave a comment or a +1 on any posts.
Emails are fully
capable of being interacted with through the watch whether it be an
initiated email that you send or one that you’re replying to, SMS
messages are another story as the notifications “reply” feature will
only open up the app when you tap it. That is unless of course you use
Hangouts as your default SMS app, then even replying to SMS messages can
be done using the voice typing feature. We know that notifications can
be a bit daunting especially if you have all of them coming to your
watch consistently throughout the day. Dismissing them is easy enough,
but the Android Wear application that is installed on your device will
give you the ability to blacklist certain apps from mirroring
notifications to the watch if you wish. This is called “muting” and will
block those notifications from showing up on the watch entirely.
Unfortunately this will be the only option for certain apps
notifications, but it might be better than having your watch vibrate
every few minutes. You can also mute the notification sound for your
device if you don’t want it to sound off, which can be helpful if you’ll
be interacting with it on the watch anyway. Have any questions about
Android Wear? Feel free to leave them in the comments!
No comments:
Post a Comment