Android ar does a lot of things right even at this early stage in its development, but there are glaring usability problems too. You can’t use a ar watch for more than a few minutes without getting annoyed by some of ’s decisions. t’s take a look at the things needs to fix in Android ar before it’s going to be ready for primetime. Starting apps by voice is fine most of the time, but if you’re in any situation that makes shouting at your wrist awkward or impossible, you have to open the search screen scroll all the way to the bottom to get to the app list. It’s a really unintuitive, inconvenient location. Sometimes the lack of a card history isn’t a huge deal. If you lose an email notification, you can just check your phone later. But may the gods of technology help you if you swipe away the weather card. It’ll come back in about a day, when Now decides to show it again. There really needs to be a way to reinstate dismissed cards because cards define the entire interface. However, the distance to the turn doesn’t show up when the screen dims—only the road direction display. This makes it much harder to use, sometimes the street name is so long that even the full card cuts off the distance. Think you’re off the hook if you’re walking? Nope. Initiating navigation from the watch will always start driving navigation, there’s no way to change it. Android ar uses some befuddling system to determine which card gets to be at the top of the list, there are no settings to change it. It would be fabulous if you could simply make the weather card hang out at the top, for example. The problem is that the delay is far too short: You get barely two seconds to read over your words. If you need more time, you have to tap on the screen to pause then send manually, which rather defeats the purpose of hs-free voice input. Unfortunately, the screen automatically dims goes back to black–white mode in about three seconds, there’s no user-configurable option. This is a power saver on the Gear ve with its AMOD display, but not so much on the G tch. l you have is always on, or not always on. There really ought to be an option to set your own timeout. The stock watch faces have the access required to shrink that card, so you can actually see what time it is. has said the watch face A is coming, but developers don’t seem to be waiting… although they really should.
