Android Wear smartwatches, which were launched with a lot of promises haven’t been able to deliver on most of them. With Apple releasing Apple Watch, and Pebble setting new records with its smartwatches, one could say that Google’s Android Wear smartwatches haven’t seen the success the company anticipated from it. In more than one year, the company only saw seven Android Wear smartwatches ship by its partners. The shipment figures of them aren’t exactly very pleasing, either. But the company is willing to make another effort to revive the platform. At the conference today, Google noted an impending update for Android Wear, which brings with it a number of exciting features.
The update adds an always on display to show time as well as apps more often than usual. The apps will appear in glance mode in accordance with your activity and location. More interestingly, the update also adds wrist gestures support to watch, allowing users to flick their wrist to go through a list and do similar things without ever touching the display. In addition, the company is also adding a “draw and emoji” feature to the watch. The company took the opportunity to remind us that there are over 4,000 apps specifically for Android Wear smartwatches. It also announced that more popular apps including Uber, Foursquare, Citymapper among others are arriving to the platform. Spoiler alert: the ability to say “Ok, Google, call me a taxi” and get a taxi is one of the best things technology could ever do for you.
