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Wearables & Gadgets

Android Wear will soon let couples share photos and sketches from their wrists

Android Wear is set to receive a small but important change over the next few weeks. Google today announced that all Android Wear smartwatches will receive an update that allows for interactive watch faces, allowing taps or swipes to initiate commands or share information.

androidwearbits

The company is detailing three of those new watch faces today, the first of which is Bits from Monument Valley maker ustwo, a high-density watch home screen that allows users to add complications like weather, calendar, missed calls, emails, battery, time zone, steps taken and more.

The idea is that instead of opening apps or flipping through multiple Google Now cards to get that information, everything can be accessible through watch face taps while keeping the design organized and accessible.

UnderArmour

The next is a fitness-based interactive watch face from Under Armour, which connects to the company’s UA Record community to show activity and sleep stats in a single place. And because it works with Google Fit, even if you don’t wear your Android Wear smartwatch to bed, it can show stats from other trackers like the Jawbone Up3 that have better longevity.

Finally, Google has created its own integrated watch face called Together, which allows two Android Wear users to share photos, sketches, locations, activities and more throughout the day. Utilizing the new Nearby API (or a unique URL), the Android Wear app finds the partner watch and pairs them together, allowing them to periodically push new data to one another.

With Android Wear’s relatively small user base, and its lineup that has heretofore been fairly inaccessible to smaller wrists, it will be interesting to see whether Together can convince couples to go all-in on Android and Android Wear.

The Android Wear 1.3 firmware update that will support these new interactive watch faces will be rolling out in the coming weeks, according to Google, so stay tuned.

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