Today’s announcement of the upcoming Android Wear update revealed some much needed and interesting new features coming to devices, like hands-free interactions, giving users the ability to cycle through their cards with just a flick of the wrist. This works for both cycling backwards and forwards through the cards notifications, so should you accidentally flick one too many times you can always flick back the other direction to go back a card. This in itself will make Android Wear smartwatches that much more useful, and according to Sony this will bring all Android Wear devices forward to version 5.1.
This wasn’t detailed by Google in their announcement that went out this morning, but not to worry as Sony has highlighted this fact on their own blog post about the update coming to the Sony Smartwatch 3. While Sony never mentions any other devices, and why would they, all Android Wear devices end up on the exact same software version builds. Sony also mentions a couple of new features coming with this update that Google didn’t detail in their own post, one of which is pop up notifications. Sony describes this as a function that will allow incoming cards to pop up on the display even if you’re in any other menu on your watch, so if you’re already looking at your Dominos pizza tracker and a notification comes in from a message, you’ll be able to see the card pop up similar to the way it would on a smartphone.
The other new functionality coming to Android Wear in the 5.1 update will be the ability to change the font sizes. This could be hugely beneficial for anyone who has trouble reading small text, as they’ll now be able to enlarge the font size to best suit their needs. It will also allow those who would prefer to have things in a smaller font so they can presumably fit more text on the display to do so. With the growing variety of Android Wear devices out there, perhaps you just feel that some displays will be better suited for a specific font size, and now you’ll have the option to set things exactly to your liking.