The LG G Smartwatch and the Samsung Gear Live Smartwatch, two of the first web-connected smartwatches to run on Android Wear, will be available for pre-order via the Google Play store starting Wednesday afternoon.
Google announced during its annual I/O developers conference in San Francisco on Wednesday that the LG G smartwatch and the Samsung Gear Live are now ready for the market. LG's model was first introduced in March, along with the Android Wear platform and Motorola's 360 smartwatch, but more details surfaced during Google's keynote presentation.
While the Moto 360 smartwatch won't go on sale until later this summer, Google said Samsung Gear Live is "joining the Android family," starting on Wednesday.
The Samsung Gear Live ($199), which comes with a built-in heart rate monitor, can be paired with any Android device running Android 4.3 or higher. It's available in two flavors: black and red wine. Other specs include a Super AMOLED screen, a 1.2 GHz Processor, Bluetooth 4.0 LE, 512 MB of RAM and 4GB of internal memory. It's dimensions are 37.9 x 56.4 x 8.9 mm and weighs 2 ounces.
It was also announced that the voice-enabled Android Wear platform, which lets users talk to wearables similar to Google Now, is now available in API for developers.
Google Now cards play a key role in Android, with actions such as swipe, press and hold. Cards can be swiped away and removed from the stream, while glanceable notifications about messages, weather and flight information are displayed.
Google Now cards are a key feature on Android Wear. Actions include swipe, press and hold. #GoogleIO pic.twitter.com/GOKdAhbAx7
— Mashable Tech (@mashabletech) June 25, 2014
There's social media integration, too. If you like someone's pin on Pinterest about a restaurant, for example, the watch will notify you when you're nearby. Other use cases include turn-by-turn directions and order a pizza directly from the smartwatch, in less than 20 seconds.
You can ask your smartwatch to call you a car with Lyft, and it knows your location based on the device's built-in GPS. It's possible to keep track of the car's arrival time to pick you up and rate the driver directly through the watch.
Android Wear supports both circular and square screens, and Google expects there will be many different styles.
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