Living with Android Wear 2.0

My impressions of android wear 2.0

I am a Polar M600 user, which is the flagship from polar offering the complete fitness tracker experience and also android smart watch operating system too. This wasn't an easy decision to pick as i have moved from the Pebble time with superior battery life, after also being an owner of an android wear watch before an LG G watch R. This is the comprimise of both as i now have the fitness tracker, which is way more accurate than my pebble and the never delivered pebble time 2 that I had pre-ordered.

As you can see, i decided to buy all 3 colour straps which you can find on amazon. The black started to look a bit ugly, I've now embraced the size of this device, and added some flare to it.

These pictures were taken before the 2.0 upgrade. However, Polar have decided to keep the familiarity with the fitness tracking application, it still works exactly the same as before, but they have decided to add extra tracking metrics for swimming, its supposed to be able to tell what stroke you are performing, i will be sure to test that out next week when i am on holiday and post my findings so stay tuned for that.

When the upgraded OTA was ready, i was very disappointed as i had 90% charge, but didn't have the cable with me when it was ready, meaning i needed to wait until i was home until i could install the update. One of the first things which i noticed had changed, there is now a nice dark grey them throughout the interface. I'm really no fan of a white ui. We also have google assistant;

The dictation from Google assistant is instant, which means there is a voice to text engine directly on the device with no need to send the audio up to googles servers, this gives a faster user experience.

Below is how the new apps menu appears:

Another new addition is the play store, google intend to have the watch as a standalone device, you copy your google account to the device with android wear application during setup. A side note, I have also noticed you can now locate the device with Android device manager, and remotely wipe it.

Some of the apps which are standalone apps are Telegram messenger, Google Play music and Even Google maps. This is important as the apps work independently from the phone. With Google music you can access your whole library over WiFi from the watch, and pair to Bluetooth headphones. It also functions as it did before, allowing you to control music on the phone and output audio to phone.

The same battery saving tips apply here that did with android wear 1.6

-Disable the following for better battery

Ambient display

WiFi

Gestures

Twist to illuminate screen

GPS

Stay tuned for the swimming polar functions