Android Wear

What the Android Wear OS has got – Notifications, Timer, Home Shortcut (via Preview SDK)

The Android Wear SDK is released, for the developers to check it out and understand what is to come, and what are possibilities with it. It was all a bundle of surprises when Google announced the Android Wear OS for wearables, and then LG and Motorola announcing their own smart watches, to be powered with this new OS. How cool was that? Now, for those who are into the serious side, and wanted to know what all can be actually done, the guys at Android Police have done their investigation job in checking out what the Android Wear Preview SDK provides.

What all is being included below is the initial stage, and we would surely see more in the final versions in the coming months – with two early devices being the LG G Watch and the Moto 360 smart watches.

Unfortunately for those who were totally excited (I too was) about the voice commands and the inputs, that isn’t working in the SDK right now, and you could try the commanding only with the keyboard type-in commands for now, just to check out how well it works.

Android Wear SDK Preview

Image credit: Enrico Ros

  • The actual stuff which works, and was available to play around with, includes:
  • Home screen with the clock and the button for voice input, and the notification panel on the top
  • Pull down from the top of the screen, to show the charge percentage and the date.
  • A very tiny area on the screen gives you the access to take you back to the home screen from any internal sections.
  • Flicking up and down would let you read the various notifications.
  • In-app options available for each notification, i.e. swiping right to left would let you work on the particular Gmail message which you opened as a notification.
  • Swipe from left to right on a notification, and that would dismiss it both on the smart watch as well as on the smartphone.
  • Reading the entire notification is possible on the little watch screen.
  • A particular time is set for the screen to dim, but its still an unanswered question whether the screen would be totally blank or we would be seeing the time, with the watch having the active display for voice commands.
  • Each action for a particular Gmail message in seen on a swipe. That is because of the small screen size, you won’t be able to see different options in a single screen.

Enrico Ros, one of the members in the Android Wear Developers Community on Google Plus, shared a few screenshots showing what was found on deep digging.

android.settings.SETTINGS: This brings the Settings activity {power off, airplane mode, reset to factory and information} – clicking 10 times on the build number makes you a “developer”.

com.google.android.clockwork.action.TIMER -n com.google.android.wearablepreview.app/com.google.android.clockwork.home.timer.SetTimerActivity – this is for the countdown timer, which could be set for X minutes, and you can watch it timing out, or you can delete / reset it.

com.google.android.wearablepreview.app/com.google.android.clockwork.home.incomingcall.PhoneActivity –el call_time_ms 0 – An unknown caller dialog on the screen showing you how an incoming call is notified on the watch.

That is it, about what all is available in the SDK available for the developers. We would be trying this out soon, and check out for more as it progresses from an exciting start already.

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