Description: As Google works on their official Watch Face API, developers continue to find ways of bringing more functionality to our Android Wear watches. Weather Wear is one of those, and it does exactly what it says it does; it puts the weather on your watch. It sounds like a fairly simple concept, but in reality the watch has more than just a forecast and temperature to offer. It’s configurable to show you different aspect of the weather right now, tells you the battery percentage of your watch as well as the date. As watch faces go, Weather Wear is easily one of the more featured faces available, but let’s take a look at Weather Wear and see just how good a watch face it is.
How it Works: First of all, you need to actually own an Android Wear watch, which means either an LG G Watch or Samsung Gear Live (or anything else that runs Android Wear), this isn’t designed for your Pebble, Galaxy Gear or Sony SmartWatch. With that out of the way, all you need to do is download Weather Wear from the Play Store and open up the app.
The first settings page you come to is for the different watch faces, some of which are only available if you pay the (fairly small) in-app purchase fee to unlock the full app. When you do so, there are some more colorful options available.
The settings page is full of different tweaks you can apply to your watch face to make it a little more useful, like the ability to change what gets displayed on the bottom portion of the watch face as well as the added feature of your watch vibrating when you’ve disconnected from your phone.
It’s worth noting that you should disable cards showing on the dimmed screen. Otherwise, a card from your watch will block the weather and info below the time. You can do this from the Android Wear app in the settings menu as shown below.
While this setup process does seem a little lengthy, it really doesn’t that long and below is a photo of how the watch face looks on my G Watch.
Opinion: I’ve been using my G Watch since before it was officially released, and I’ve played around with a lot of different watch faces since then. Weather Wear is one of the better options I’ve found that effectively makes use of the entire display of an Android Wear watch. While you need to hide cards on the dimmed display in order to get the most out of this, it still offers you all the information you could want and then some. It tells you the day and date, battery percentage as well as the weather. It looks good, it’s unassuming and matches the rest of Android Wear quite nicely. With extra features like a slew of watch face themes and a vibration to let you know you’ve left your phone behind, Weather Wear is a good choice if you’re fed up of bouncing from watch face to watch face.
Ratings
- Speed (4/5) – I noticed no effect on how quickly my G Watch ran when using Weather Wear, and it’s fairly quick to setup as well.
- Features (5/5) – No other watch face offers you the same array of features and while some of them require you to pay for them, it’s still good value.
- Theme (4/5) – Using similar fonts as Android itself, Weather Wear doesn’t stick out and the icons are good-looking as well as easily understood.
- Overall (4/5) – An excellent option for those looking to make the most of that large display, Weather Wear is only going to get better.
Pros
- Weather Wear is easy to get set up and there’s an array of options to tweak on your phone – where it’s most convenient.
- Looks good on the watch with a number of different color combinations and a font choice that matches the rest of Android Wear.
- Extra features like the vibration to tell you you’ve left your phone behind are all nice touches.
- More than just a weather watch face, it displays more than just the temperature and has a nice selection of options on what to display.
Cons
- Some sort of notification option, in order to use the bottom space for unread emails or something would be nice.
- More font choices like sizes and such would be nice to see.
Conclusion: There’s room for improvement here, but until Google releases their official watch face API, Weather Wear is one of the best out there. It effectively makes good use of your large Android Wear display and it can be really handy for glanceable information on what the weather is going to do. Sure, a way to swipe left or right to gain access to a four day forecast or something like that would be handy, but the developers here have done the best they can with what Google have put out there, and it’s a very good attempt and will be sticking on my wrist for some time to come.