Google Tracker, I/O Edition—What Google Is Working on Before the Big Show
With Google I/O coming up in just a few days, it’s time for a second edition of The Google Tracker, what we hope will be a bi-yearly look at what’s going on at Google HQ. Just like last time, we’ll have a potent mix of news, (good) rumors, and a bit of informed speculation thrown in. We’re not personally guaranteeing all of this will show up at Google I/O—this is more of a to-do list of upcoming projects, most of which we aren’t attaching an expected time frame to.
Still, with Google’s product launch extravaganza just around the corner, it’s a good idea to have a fresh set of potential announcements in your head. This year could see Google tackling everything from watches to TVs to enterprise computing.
Android Wear
One project that we definitely expect to launch at I/O is Android Wear, Google’s big push into wearable computing. At the beginning of the year, all we had was a vague rumor about a Google smartwatch and the company’s 2012 purchase of WIMM, an early smartwatch outfit. Since then, the company has officially announced Android Wear as basically Android-for-smartwatches. Google released an emulator which contained a ton of info about the new OS.
The best part of the wearable OS is that, while you can write apps specifically for Android Wear, out of the box it includes significant functionality for every Android app. By plugging into Android’s built-in notification API, Android Wear displays every notification your phone gets. Any app that has buttons in its notification will automatically have those buttons displayed on the watch. The only thing that requires developer support is voice-to-text functionality, which is mostly just a tag informing Android Wear where the text goes.
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