Android Wear 2.0 Has Landed—Here Are All the New Features

People who like smartwatches tend to be the always-on, hyperconnected, Type-A people. People who like that their watch buzzes to get their attention even when their phone isn't nearby. Wear 2.0 refines all those notifications, so that instead of a huge card that takes over the screen you see a small icon pop up at the bottom. Tap it and you go to your notification; ignore it and you go about your day.

For most people, smartwatches are glorified fitness trackers. Google Fit, which powers Android Wear's health capabilities, is finally up to the task. Your watch can now detect that you're working out, and even figure out when you switch from push-ups to squats. Third-party apps can read and write data from Fit, too, so if you switch to Runkeeper you won't lose your decade of Nike+ data. For most things, you won't even need a third-party app. You can just open Fit, pick "sit-up challenge," and go to work.

Google imagines you might use one watchface for the workday, with your calendar and a more formal clock. Then when you go home, you swipe over and the silly face with a picture of your kid and music controls appears. Rather than use two watches, you wear one watch with two personalities. Once I set it up, I really liked it. I even created a third workout face, with all my stats one tap away. I don't have kids, so I just used a picture of Kevin from Home Alone. I highly recommend it.

Since Android Wear now includes Google's Play Store, you can download apps from your wrist, to your wrist. All the scroll-scroll-scrolling is tedious, but it works. You don't need to install an app on your phone just to get it on your watch. Your watch can also connect directly to Wi-Fi—or even LTE, if you get the giant LG Watch Sport. Once you go through the first setup, you hardly need your phone anymore. Which means if you, dear iPhone user, want a smartwatch but don't want an Apple Watch, you finally have other options. Android Wear mostly just treats your phone as a router, so it doesn't care which phone you're using.

Virtually every single thing about Wear 2.0 is faster than before. Apps open more quickly, notifications are more efficient, even games feel semi-playable. But faster doesn't mean fast. My two watches take eons to boot, and apps like to spin a bit before loading. Evidently Google can't find room within the tiny bezels for truly powerful processing.

Google thinks smartwatches are great for texting. So it gave you 100,000 ways to do it. You can reply with your voice, which is good and reasonable. You can use emoji, or Google's canned responses, which work fine. You can scribble letters one at a time on the screen. Or you can use the on-screen keyboard, because somehow Google decided it was a good idea to put a 26-letter keyboard on a teeny tiny screen. It's more usable than I expected, but not really usable at all.

Google won't explicitly say so, but it clearly made Wear 2.0 with the idea that most smartwatches are going to be round from now on. The slightly curving app drawer, the way notifications are presented, even the watchfaces themselves are clearly made with round screens in mind. Which is great! Round watches fit better next to that weird bone you have on your wrist, and tend to look better anyway.

After two-plus years of watching people use Android Wear, Google has a pretty good idea of what people do on their smartwatches. Yet even Google doesn't seem to know what a smartwatch's future is. Wear 2.0 doubles down on all those things, and makes them mostly better. What it doesn't do is make any kind of new case for why the non-smartwatch-owning masses should suddenly jump on board. There's nothing radically new here, no exciting take on the future. It's just a really good fitness machine, and a way to text your friends from your wrist. That's fine, but it's not going to set the world on fire.