Google is officially in the smartwatch business with the Motorola Moto 360 and the new Android Wear operating system. The new smartwatch from Motorola shows subtle alerts and notifications to users, when required. Further, the Moto 360 also shows who's emailing or even calling, without taking out the connected smartphone from your pocket. As of now, Motorola has not revealed that whether the Moto 360 could feature direct voice-calling functionality.
Google has chosen to debut Android Wear in its own device, as Google currently owns Motorola, but expect to see the operating system in a range of products coming in 2014. Google has already announced partnerships with Fossil, Samsung, Intel, HTC, Asus, LG, and more. As you can see, Fossil is among the brands that will be working on smartwatches (which actually isn't new for them, but they have yet to find success with a smartwatch). I expect additional traditional watch makers to develop their own smartwatch hardware to run Google Wear in the near future. I wonder who the first Swiss watch brand will be.
A major issue with smartwatches is that unlike a smartphone or other device, there is really no easy way to input data or issue commands. The screen is too small to type on, and the case can only have so many buttons and pushers. So, when it comes down to it the logical input method is simply speaking to it. Given that reality, Google has designed the Android Wear experience to revolve around voice commands. When Google Glass was released, people became familiar with the "OK Google" voice command that got the device's attention, but the ability of Android Wear will go beyond that.
The idea, according to Google, is for Android Wear to respond to natural language in response to notifications and to input information. Speech recognition has become good enough so that assuming the device can hear you, it can understand your commands in plain English (and other languages). The user's voice will become a principal means of using a Android Wear's interface. More than likely, the device will use an internal microphone to transmit the voice recording to a Google server via the Internet for recognition and response of the voice command. I do not believe that the individual smartwatch devices themselves contain the processing power necessary to receive, decode, and act on voice commands. That does inherently mean that without an Internet connection, the functionality of an Android Wear-powered smartwatch will be limited - but that is to be expected of this and other future devices for the time being.
Google is no doubt aware of these issues and would not have released news about the Moto 360 or Android Wear if they were not at least mostly satisfied with the performance. Of course, to a large degree it is up to hardware and third-party software developers to help optimize the relationship between smartwatch and phone. Google or Motorola has thus far not specifically discussed the connectivity of the Moto 360, but it will likely use some version of Bluetooth. Personally, we look forward to a Bluetooth successor as I have been mostly disappointed with Bluetooth performance for years now.
We are a few months away from a retail version of the Motorola Moto 360 smartwatch being available, so a lot of information is not yet available. In particular, we do not know how much battery life it will have, how effective the microphone or general connectivity is, or how well it connects with your phone. These are all issues that will be determined in good time but are extremely important.
No comments:
Post a Comment