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Google launches nine new fancy-schmancy designer watch faces for Android Wear

If you’ve ever looked at your Android Wear smartwatch and felt like a complete plebeian, then your chance at redeeming yourself is at hand, as Google launched several new watch faces for its smartwatch operating system.

These watch faces, nine in total, come from “iconic” fashion brands that only those in the fashion industry will seemingly recognize at first glance. The fashion brands include Ted Baker, Melissa Joy Manning, Vivienne Tam, Nicole Miller, Y-3, Mango, Zoe Jordan, Harajaku Kawaii!, and Asics.

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As you probably already determined, the watch faces from these brands don’t add any sort of functionality and don’t really add anything to the Android Wear experience apart from looking rather nice, in all honesty. The only watch face that seemingly brings some semblance of functionality is Asics’, which keeps track of the previous day’s progress, seemingly in the number of steps you’ve taken, and compares the data to the current day’s progress.

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Because of Android Wear’s flexibility in terms of design adaptation, all of the aforementioned watch faces are available for both square and circle Android Wear smartwatches. In addition, they are all currently available on Android through Google Play, though iPhone owners will have to wait a few days.

Regardless, the nine new designer watch faces join the already wide swath of watch faces available for Android Wear, which include the likes of Hello Kitty, Moods of Norway, and Gundam. All in all, there are over 1,500 watch faces available for Android Wear, a statistic that not even the Apple Watch can touch, due to its omission of custom watch faces even in watchOS 2.0, the smartwatch’s most recent update.

Until Apple decides to relent and open up support for such watch faces, however, expect Google to continue to blow the watch face horn.

Williams Pelegrin
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