Next month is going to be exciting for wearable gadget owners. It looks like the time has finally come for Android Wear 2.0 to hit the stands. While there’s still a month left, we’re very close to the release date. Until that happens however, there’s a more pressing matter at hand. We’re talking about the Developer Build of Android Wear 2.0. The OS has been the subject of multiple beta builds, and the last one before the final cut that ends up on Live is now available thanks to the Developer Preview.
There are several changes attributed to this final build. The most notable of them however is the fact that Google has included support for Apple’s iOS platform. This means that the Play Store for smartwatches will not feature support for iPhones. If you like the kind of applications a smartwatch paired with an Android phone has, you can now have the exactly same ones if you’ve paired your watch with an iPhone, which is pretty neat.
New hand-off flows will also be made available to the iPhone users, further increasing the watch’s value when paired with an iOS device. Battery life was a concern in the past in regards to pairing phones with smartwatches, but that has been looked into since and the new Android Wear 2.0 build brings an enhanced bandwidth management that has in mind preserving battery life.
While Google has announced that users will be able to try out Android Wear 2.0 sometime in February, it is not yet known when exactly in February it will become available. It might be a couple days or a couple weeks after February starts, meaning that once the timer starts ticking, there’s quite a gap between the start and end of release date possibilities.
On a brighter note, it’s good that we at least know that the OS is coming, and it’s coming soon. February itself isn’t very far ahead, and those that have managed to wait this long will surely have no problem in waiting a bit longer. There will be a multitude of changes, a lot of them focusing on bug squashes and stability, but also active changes such as the iOS support feature that will definitely enhance the user experience.
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