Android Wear vs the Apple Watch, which is better?

One thing that Apple has always done exceptionally well is to make clean, intuitive user interfaces that don’t overload you with too many unnecessary distractions. That’s why it’s somewhat surprising to see, at least at first glance, that Apple’s Watch UI looks much busier and cluttered compared with the more minimal approach taken by Google with Android Wear. Ars Technica’s Ron Amadeo, who created the infographic earlier this week that mocked the iPhone 6’s 2012-era specs, has done an extensive side-by-side comparison of both the Apple Watch’s user interface and Android Wear’s user interface as shown on the Moto 360.

No one has really figured out what a smartwatch should look like yet, but one thing is for sure: Google and Apple have taken vasty different routes to getting a computer on your wrist. To show just how different, we put together this gallery of similar screens from the Apple Watch and Android Wear. They should be easy enough to tell apart: the Apple Watch is the square one, while the Android Wear screenshots are all from the Moto 360 and are therefore (mostly) round. While we know just about everything there is to know about the Moto 360, the Apple Watch isn’t actually a released product yet, so we’re going off our best educated guess for some of these. We had to swipe pictures from Apple’s promotional images (which sadly weren’t a super-high resolution), and it was up to us to crop them into a “screenshot.” Apple hasn’t released specs for the screen, and where exactly the bezel stops and starts in many of Apple’s promotional shots is up to interpretation. By our calculations, though, and by using enlightening images like this,it looks like the Apple Watch has a 4:5 aspect ratio. The watch OS (we don’t know the operating system’s name yet) usually has a black background picture on a black bezel, so to maximize screen space, Apple often puts UI elements right against the edge of the screen, allowing the bezel to act as the “padding” that would traditionally be in a well-designed interface.