Can Android wear be popularized before Apple Watch?

December 25--in early July, Android Wear officially landed a small screen of wearable products, with the first two smart watch LG G watch and Samsung Gear Live with Android. In the next few months, there have been some major changes in the Android Wear sector, including the birth of several new Android Wear smart watches and a major software update.

On top of that, Android Wear has made Google a big advantage in its race against Apple, its main competitor. Apple Watch has yet to enter the market, and the company is not officially running.

What does it mean for Google, the two big mobile giants, to seize the initiative? For the Android Wear platform, this means Google, its app developers and smart watch makers can get valuable data for several months. Android Wear will also have a deeper advantage. Google has begun to detect what Apple seems to have yet to discover and iterate accordingly: What smart watch users really want is to simplify and not deepen their reliance on smartphones.

Experience comparison

From the current situation, the Android wear platform wants to provide a simple, intuitive, smart watch experience that allows users to get the notification information they need without too much interaction. Developers are also beginning to notice the platform's intentions. This week, Internet telephony company Vonage announced that its Vonage mobile app could trigger a "now inconvenient call" preset response by simply double-clicking the dial. This feature--the initiative--allows users to quickly skip calls and text messages from Vonage applications without looking at smart watches. This is a simple solution that helps simplify the user experience. The double screen "is essentially a macro that involves 6 different actions," says Grady Reno Grady Leno, vice president of Vonage products. Through it, you can skip the user interface and hit the user's core requirements. ”

By contrast, the Apple watch experience is not that simple. While its design wizards encourage the creation of a personalized, comprehensive and lightweight experience, Apple Watch seems intent on bringing the full smartphone experience to smart watches. "Magnifying the display on a small screen is critical," Joni Yves Jony Ive, Apple's senior vice president for design, said at the time of the release of Apple Watch. So we developed a new interface for the challenges of such a small product. "This new interface is the" digital crown "Crown Knob, designed to allow users to deepen and extend the navigation experience through the watch interface. However, while Apple has proudly provided such an enhanced navigation tool, the Android Wear seems to be a better place because it eliminates the need to view the display.

Valuable data

Another boost to the Android wear ecosystem is the use of data that can be collected over the next few months. Before Apple Watch into the market, Android wear will be able to get important data from Gmail, Google Maps and many other applications. This has begun to show up with new interactive features such as software updates and the "double click" feature described above.

This is just the beginning, Vonage director Blaine Stocks (Bryan Stokes). "Android Wear has been upgraded to 1.5 generations and is spreading from early adopters to mainstream audiences." "he said. He also believes that "Android wear has become more intelligent in sending messages to your watch." Over the next few iterations, we'll see it further customized and hopefully it will be able to disconnect further from the smartphone, making us less immersed in technical communications. ”

In contrast to Apple Watch, it is still in the final stages of design and testing, meaning that it will at least be behind the Android Wear for an entire generation by the time it is launched. This means that the Android Wear has more update iterations, which means there may be a new wave of Android Wear smart watches competing with Apple Watch. Those new products will be driven by real data for several months, and should be more responsive to consumer demand than the first Android Wear devices.

Security threats?

Another concern about smart watches is their potential threat to information security. While Apple has been icloud in recent months over security concerns, a Romanian security firm has found it is not difficult to break the Bluetooth connection between a linked smartphone and a smart watch. This may put some potential early adopters in a dilemma because they need to keep the information they receive through e-mail or other means of communication secret. The prospect of such vulnerable devices being incorporated into the corporate BYOD (self-contained device) policy is very slim, which means that the people most likely to be wearing smart devices-the professionals who need mobile office-may be excluded.

On the good side, Android wear devices may soon lead to security improvements. Bitdefender Senior security Analyst Liviu Assena (Liviu Arsene) explains that these security risks can be easily addressed by implementing stronger and better methods to ensure the security of the entire communication. "His recommendations include using NFC (Near-field communications) to securely transmit pin codes when paired, but he warns that using NFC" is likely to increase the cost and complexity of the device, "he said. "Another option would be to replace the Bluetooth encryption between the Android device and the smart watch, using another layer of encryption at the application level."

Security is a good aspect of the late launch of Apple Watch. As Google deals with the potential security concerns of devices that have fallen into the hands of consumers, Apple has a few more months to build seamless and safe equipment. Because Apple Watch is designed to be used in tandem with the iphone, its security options are much, much more real than those of Android Wear devices.

Apple Watch will take some time to launch, and the Android Wear platform developer has begun to redouble its effort to create more intuitive features. Will this first-ever advantage help Android Wear, or is it going to make the Apple Watch perfect its features early next year? Just as many other factors in the race to define smart watch as a new category, only time can give an answer.

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)