How can such a prominent product, from such a brilliant company, be so embarrassingly bad?
On a recent trip to Canada, I decided to take an Android Wear smartwatch. I'd be doing a lot of walking, and I brought it on the principle that carrying the Internet on my wrist would enable me to pay more attention to my environment and less to my phone. (As an Android phone user, I can't use the Apple Watch.)
The trip with Android Wear left me believing a little more in smartwatches, and appalled to the point of embarrassment by Google's efforts. It's all on Google, too, not the watch manufacturers. While the various Android Wear watches look different, and my LG Watch Urbane was handsome and comfortable, they all run stock or nearly stock Google software.
Android Wear's flaws are problems of execution, not vision, which makes them even more perplexing. We're still figuring out what to do with wearables, so we should expect the vision of their user interfaces to evolve. But what I experienced was much dumber than that.
1. Totally unreliable Bluetooth connectivity. I was using the watch with our Editors' Choice Alcatel One Touch Idol 3 unlocked smartphone, running Android 5.0 Lollipop. Pretty often, when I tried to "OK Google," I'd get a "not connected" message because the phone's power management had put Bluetooth into hibernation, and I'd have to turn the phone screen on. That's ridiculous. It was also at the heart of many other problems, because if you can't assume your watch is connected, you just stop bothering to use it.
2. Incomprehensible app interfaces. I wanted to use Yelp and some transit apps, for instance. I still have no idea how that would work. Cards appear when they want to, not when you want them to, and in whatever order they want. I did not, at any point, feel like the master of my smartwatch.
3. Comically poor local search. This was the biggest shocker, because Google Maps is the global standard for local search. But I just couldn't figure out how to get what I wanted—trust me, I tried. The problem is that while Google is great at local search, it's still not quite at the natural language level. I kept asking the watch simple, natural-language, location-related questions like "where is the nearest TTC station" (Toronto's transit system), "where is a taco restaurant near me," or even "show me the nearest Four Seasons." That last one should have given me a hotel location (because the word "nearest" should signal natural language search.) Instead, it gave me a photo of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.
When you're on the road, location-based, contextual information is key. Android Wear should ideally tell you when the next bus is coming (it didn't), how much the bus fare is (nope) and how far you are from the stop (never). It's supposed to tell you where to find food if you're hungry (it did, but never the closest or the best actual choice.) I could do all of those with my phone, no problem. But nope, not the watch. The information just wouldn't move over to the screen I needed it on.
Android Wear is all about machine intelligence, but the machine isn't nearly intelligent enough. This is the problem with Google Now in general, and why that once-flagship product has been bubbling just a little bit under the surface for a while now. Google wants to present us with the information we want before we know we want it, but it's still a few years off from being able to do so.