Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Google today announced that it plans to officially bring Android to smartwatches through its new project called Android Wear. It will enable developers to use features such as Google's Voice Search and health-tracking apps on wristwatches.

It's a free, open-source operating system, just like the smartphone and tablet version of Android.

According to a Google blog post, Android Wear will have many of the features found on existing smartwatches, including the ability to display updates from social media, message alerts, shopping notifications, and news....

While I was down at CES 2014 last week, I spent a lot of time looking at smart watches. In addition to showing the date and time, these watches also alert the wearer of incoming calls, text, emails or had other applications.

I have a Pebble watch and I was interested in what other similar watches are out there. I like my Pebble, but there is one really annoying thing about it: it doesn’t show that it needs to be charged. It just stops working – goes dead.

I looked at seven watches (actually, eight, but more about that later). There were a lot more than eight at CES, but with 3,000 vendors, I did what I could. I did not look at the Samsung, OR Sony watches as there are lots of reviews of them. The ones I looked at could be divided into three broad categories: colour screen watches ($350 and up), black and white screen watches ($130 and up) and one other with unique features....