Android Wear 5.0 Lollipop features revealed

[techbeck]

With Android 5.0 Lollipop showing up on the Moto X, being announced for the LG G3, and of course Google?s latest round of Nexus devices hitting the Play Store, Android fans have been wondering when the latest sweet treat from Google will hit their wrist computer. Yesterday, we showed you the first part of that update with Material Design changes and features coming to the Android Wear companion app. Today, we?re going to show you the second part of our two part feature. This is an exclusive look into some of the new features coming to the Android Wear 5.0 Lollipop update.

 

Once your Android Wear smartwatch has been updated to Android 5.0 Lollipop, the Android Wear companion app truly comes to life, adding additional features. The most notable are Watch battery and Watch storage. The Watch battery page resembles what you would find under the battery information on your phone or tablet, displaying a graph with estimate battery life as well as a breakdown of which apps are chewing away at battery juices. The Lollipop update for Android Wear includes a Watch storage monitor through the companion app, allowing you to see which apps are the most storage hungry. With the recent capability of storing music on your wearable, it?s be beneficial to know exactly where you stand storage wise. Not pictured below, but  extremely important, you can now change your Watch face directly from the companion app. You?ll also notice that Debugging over Bluetooth is back. Congrats developers!

 

 

Beyond the companion app, the Lollipop update adds plenty of much sought after features for your wearable. Developers and general watch face enthusiasts will be quite happy to see an official watch face API launch. The newly revamped watch face API allows for even further customization thanks to a settings menu existing on the watch face itself. Watch faces on the Lollipop update allow for weather notifications to be displayed directly on the watch face, cutting out the need to swipe through your cards for the Google Now weather card. Some of the new watch faces and weather icons are shown below.

 

 

If you?ve ever dismissed a notification card on Android Wear to have immediately regretted that decision, you?ll be happy to know that dismissed cards can now be recovered with a simple swipe. Just swipe upwards and you?ll be presented with an undo option. This is probably one of the most sought after features since the launch of the platform and we even mentioned it here, while detailing a few features we?d like to see changed or updated in the future.

 

Another complaint with Android Wear surrounds screen brightness. For example, while at a movie theater, it?s generally frowned upon to have a bright light emanating from your wrist while others are trying to enjoy the darkness. Oppositely, it?s hard to read your smartwatch while in direct sunlight. While third party applications exist to turn screen brightness up or down and you can also mute notifications on your phone and on your smartwatch to solve this issue, clearly something a bit more user friendly needs to be done.

 

More....

http://phandroid.com/2014/11/11/android-wear-5-0-lollipop-features-revealed-smartwatch/

[HoochieMamma]

Sweet, my Moto 360 is going to love this.