Google is getting ready to make its Android Wear software, which powers wearable devices like smartwatches, work with Apple's iPhone.
The company will add support for Apple's iOS software and Wi-Fi in the next version of Android Wear, which could come out in the next few weeks, according to a person familiar with Google's plans. Google's plans were first reported by The Verge.
Google declined to comment.
The move would radically expand Google's potential customer base because it would let iPhones work with Android Wear-powered smartwatches. Apple sold 66.5 million iPhones in the last quarter alone. Smartwatches based on Google's Android Wear, which currently only work with other Android smartphones, have had a slow start as consumers question the need for the devices.
Samsung, Sony and Motorola Mobility, which has the market-leading Moto 360 watch, already offer smartwatches based on Android Wear. And at Mobile World Congress in March, LG unveiled the LG Watch Urbane, while Huawei introduced its own Watch with sapphire glass.
Six products running Google's operating system for wearables accounted for 720,000 units, or 15.6 percent of a total of 4.6 million wearable products shipped in 2014, according to research firm Canalys.
Google unveiled Android Wear in March 2014. The platform took center stage at the company's I/O developer conference last year, where the company showed off its ability to integrate with car services or track your heart rate. The team behind Android Wear promised to update the software frequently, as the market expands. In September, the company said it would allow the software to connect with devices via Bluetooth, which lets nearby devices transmit data to each other.But awareness for smartwatches is on the rise thanks to Apple and its Apple Watch. The Watch will be available for fittings and preorders Friday, and will launch on April 24.
"We're going to iterate much more rapidly here," Vice President of Engineering for Android Hiroshi Lockheimer told CNET in September.
Huawei on Sunday announced a new premium Android Wear watch at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The Huawei Watch is the first Android Wear watch that features a scratch-proof sapphire crystal display. The company's first smartwatch is one of the best looking we have seen, with its stainless steel body and mesh (or leather) strap. The watch has a 1.4-inch circular display with a 400x400-pixel resolution, which measures to around 286 pixels per inch, and is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage. Underneath there is a heart-rate sensor that appears to be continuous for all-day tracking.
As is the case with other Android Wear watches, the Huawei Watch can display personalized Google Now cards and notifications such as text messages, emails and calls from your smartphone right on your wrist. Huawei has include over 40 customizable watch faces, including a dial that shows lunar phases, the weather and notifications in a traditional watch design.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Along with the heart-rate monitor, the watch uses a 6-axis motion sensor and barometer to track your steps, distance and calories burned. It can also automatically detect and track when a user is walking, running, biking, hiking or sleeping. Huawei has partnered with Jawbone to let users sync their data with the company's Up health app. This is in addition to being able to sync with the Google Fit app.
We didn't hear anything about battery life, although the company noted that the watch will use a "magnetic charging station" for convenient charging. Huawei has made a great feeling watch, and a new level of premium Android Wear watch. But we're judging on style, not function.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Questions remain, however. Who knows how much this will cost, and that could factor into our opinion. Also, since Android Wear has hit a wall on new hardware features being allowed, this doesn't do anything different than other Wear watches. But the 40 customizable watch faces, which look beautiful in the mockups Huawei showed, could be a difference maker. For now, this might be king of the hill. It feels like a Moto 360 meets LG Watch Urbane, but maybe even better.
The Huawei Watch will be available in more than 20 countries including the US, UK and Australia. Pricing and release information wasn't announced, although we expect a high price tag to match the premium features and design.
Ingress players can will soon be able to access the game's core functions from their Android Wear smartwatch like Motorola's Moto 360.Niantic Labs
Ingress, the augmented reality smartphone game that sets player factions against one another in real-world environments, is moving to the wrist.
Next month, players will be able to access functions of the app from Android Wear smartwatches, creator Niantic Labs said Friday. The game, which uses a device's GPS to overlay crucial points of interest for players near or around landmarks and other areas around the globe, will now let you see friendly and enemy so-called portals from your wrist. It will also let you take action to defend or capture those areas right from the watch face.
Ingress was created by Niantic Labs, a startup within Google, in fall 2012 and has since attracted a dedicated following, with more than 9 million downloads between Google's Android mobile operating system and Apple's iOS. As opposed to sitting on your couch to play the military shooter Call of Duty, Ingress urges players to get out into the world and travel to various locations -- even across country borders -- to meet up with other players for both impromptu sessions and large-scale organized events.
That Ingress is moving to smartwatches is a testament to the wearable design type as a viable platform for gaming. Though you have less real estate on a small circular or square screen, the ability to interact with simple taps while keeping your attention more focused on your surroundings allows for different kinds of gaming experiences, including incorporating the fitness elements of wearables. For instance, Ingress players can dedicate more time to interacting with other members of the game instead of burying their faces in smartphone screens.
There's a still a critical lacking of high-profile titles for smartwatches, but that's changing as wearables become more mainstream. A popular app for smartwatch startup Pebble's platform is last year's mobile sensation Flappy Bird, and big-name publisher Electronic Arts is also considering making standalone games for wearables as well as companion wearable apps that compliment mobile titles.
Though it's confined to smartphones and, now, smartwatch screens, Ingress was designed to be the "ultimate augmented reality app," says John Hanke, head of Niantic Labs. That means that as smartphone technology advances and the burgeoning market for virtual and augmented reality evolves, Ingress will with it.
Google itself is currently working on giving smartphones the ability to "see," using spatial mapping from an initiative called Project Tango. A growing crop of companies, like Microsoft and secretive Florida-based startup Magic Leap, are also building devices that overlay 3D images on top of our environment, giving us true augmented reality.
"Things like Tango and Magic Leap will be awesome for games like Ingress," Hanke said, though he's happy with how passionate the fanbase is now with just their smartphones.
"We're building a line-up of AR games for our phones and Android Wear," he added, "and whatever cool future devices get adopted in the future."
You don't need me to tell you that the smartwatch is a sci-fi dream. From "The Jetsons" to "Knight Rider" to "Power Rangers", barking orders at a wrist-worn communicator has long been held up as a paragon of the high-tech future we must surely be drifting towards -- as inevitable as augmented-reality retina implants, hoverboards or a violent robot uprising.
Today, with Samsung, LG and Google unleashing a wave of glossy, futuristic smartwatches, it's tempting to think that we're on the cusp of the next technological revolution. But while researching a recent episode of Adventures in Tech -- the show I write and present for CNET -- I was made painfully aware that while the smartwatch is enjoying a new surge in media attention, the concept of a wrist-borne computer has been forced upon us time and time again, without even a hint of success.
Sony, Seiko, LG and Fossil have all shown off smartwatches over the last few decades, each attempt sinking sadly into obscurity. In the mid-90s Microsoft partnered with Timex to build the Data Link, a gloriously retro timepiece that absorbed data from a computer wirelessly, via code flashed as a series of white lines on a CRT monitor.
To make that episode of Adventures in Tech I tracked down an original Data Link, still in its box. The packaging is littered with plaudits from the likes of Popular Mechanics, Byte Magazine and Popular Science -- which awarded the Data Link its "Best of What's New" award. Gazing at the row of tiny trophies, I couldn't help but think the praise heaped upon this retro relic could be an echo of the column inches currently devoted to Google's Android Wear.
In 20 years' time, how will Android Wear be remembered?Luke Westaway/CNET
Believe it or not, Microsoft built a slightly more contemporary rival for Google's new platform. In the early 2000s the software giant embarked on perhaps the most ambitious smartwatch campaign in history with its SPOT (Smart Personal Objects Technology) platform. SPOT technology would, Bill Gates enthused in 2003, find its way into a broad range of household objects, beginning with smartwatches.
Bill Gates promotes the SPOT Watch in 2004.Microsoft
A number of partners like Fossil and Suunto teamed up with Microsoft to build SPOT watches, which -- believe it or not -- received data via FM radio broadcast, using a subscription-based service called MSN Direct. Needless to say, as mobile phones became increasingly Internet-capable there soon wasn't much need to have news headlines, horoscopes and messages sent to your watch over radio waves.
Nevertheless, the SPOT watch, like the smartwatches before it, was out there if you wanted to buy it. And ultimately, hardly anyone did.
Indeed, as far back as the mid-80s there was wearable tech on sale that was compatible with computers such as the Apple II, and yet in 2014 the overwhelming majority of watch-wearers still stick to low-tech, time-telling devices. Why?
The smartwatch: We've been here before.Seiko
As far as I can see, there are two possible reasons for the smartwatch's repeated failure to launch. First, it could be that the technological advances required to make smartwatches genuinely appealing haven't been present thus far. The second reason is a less hopeful one: maybe people just don't like smartwatches.
Google, take note
It's not clear which of these two reasons is the right one to explain our repeated rejection of the smartwatch. Certainly Android Wear comes at a time when mobile gadgetry is positively alive with potential -- we have Bluetooth for fast wireless communication with our always-connected smartphone, and stunning curved displays that can render pertinent information and notifications with more beauty than ever before.
Google however would be wise to take note of the failed smartwatches of yesteryear, because even if they were never up to the task technologically speaking, they do prove one thing -- that persuading the general public to buy, wear and use a high-tech timepiece is no picnic. It's not enough that the smartwatch looks and feels futuristic -- they've done that for decades. What we need is for these minuscule marvels to be better than a Rolex, better than a bog-standard Casio digital watch, better than wearing nothing on your wrist at all.
The spectre of Apple
Notifications are Android Wear's bread and butter.Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET
The current crop of smartwatches serve two main purposes -- keeping track of your activity (to inform health-tracking apps and the like), and showing you notifications from your smartphone, such as missed calls, weather updates or texts.
These might be useful things to have, but I'm sure there are plenty of you out there who'd agree those aren't especially fun or exciting features. More to the point, smartwatches as they stand don't do much that a smartphone can't do. What the smartwatch industry needs is a company that can either a) think of something new and interesting for high-tech watches to do, or b) persuade us that receiving texts on our wrists is actually a fun, sexy, fashionable way to spend our time -- and money.
Apple's long-rumoured iWatch could provide the marketing push to force smartwatches into the public consciousness. After all, simply think back to 2010 and the scepticism surrounding the iPad, which at first appeared an almost laughably peculiar device -- "It's just a giant iPhone," many chortled. It's since proved to be a hugely popular and important piece of tech. Then again, the smartwatch may prove to be an idea that not even Apple can sell.
A new 3D?
The smartwatch and wearable tech phenomenon is fascinating, because in terms of success, it really could go either way. Google and Apple may ride the next wave of consumer technology all the way to the bank, but it's also possible that the smartwatch revolution is one part potential and nine parts wishful thinking.
Well, it's still wearable tech.Sarah Tew/CNET
New smartphones and tablets have, over the last few years, become more iterative and steadily less exotic -- something UK analyst Ernest Doku referred to as "handset fatigue" when we spoke to him about iOS 8. As smartphones cease to be the hottest new thing, tech manufacturers understandably start looking for something new to sell us. And they appear to have settled on hyper-advanced wristwear.
In this respect, smartwatches remind me a little of 3D, the technology foisted upon the public in a bid to keep cinemas full, and TV sales healthy, but that is frequently bemoaned by actual movie-goers. The sheer force of will from an entire industry will push smartwatches into our lives, but it's another matter altogether whether or not the public will really embrace them.
It's not impossible by any means, and I'd love to see one manufacturer or one app developer make it, in one elegant swoop, abundantly clear why the smartwatch is the new must-have gadget. But if you think back to Microsoft's poor old SPOT watch, it's clear that without this lightning bolt of brilliance, the battle to make the smartwatch popular may be a tougher fight than Google -- or anyone -- had anticipated.
