Android Wear, Google’s operating system that works on wearables like smartwatches, has a few nifty features — it can take voice dictations, do navigation for walkers and bicyclists, and send up location-sensitive notifications. The standard options are what’s expected — weather, time, maps, reminders — but a select few companies were invited to develop some of the first third-party Android Wear apps consumers can try once they get their hands on the watches. In the keynote address Wednesday morning, Google executives alluded to a few pie-in-the-sky visions: ordering a pizza to you in 20 seconds, picking up a Lyft with just a few taps of the watch face.
Google announced Android Wear back in March, but today the company gave us our first big look at its wearable platform. Android Wear, like Google’s teaser video showed, is designed to give you the information you want at a glance, not buried inside a grid of icons on your smartphone. It features much of what you’d expect from a smartwatch. The minimalist, always-on interface shows you the most important thing Google knows for you at the time, like the current status of an upcoming flight. Notifications from your phone are pushed to the watch interface, but displayed as a stack of pages you can flip through with a vertical finger swipe. A horizontal swipe gives you more details about the notification, and you can also swipe a notification away. This also removes the notification from your phone. It can show things like your boarding pass for a flight, your hotel address, a restaurant reservation, or the local bus schedule, so you don’t need to waste time pulling out your phone.
