Book Image

Mastering Android Wear Application Development

By : Siddique Hameed, Javeed Chida
Book Image

Mastering Android Wear Application Development

By: Siddique Hameed, Javeed Chida

Overview of this book

Wearable technology is the future of mobile devices. It looks set to be a breakthrough technology, just like the iPad was before it. With the Apple Watch being widely regarded as a success, all eyes are now on Google to provide a similar device for its users. Keep your skills ahead of the competition and be one of the first to fully understand this powerful new trend. This book will give you a very solid understanding of the philosophy, thought process, development details, and methodologies involved in building well-designed, robust Android Wear applications. We cover the advantages and disadvantages of the wearable computing paradigm and provide a good foundational knowledge for you to build practical, real-world wearable apps. You will learn about the various tools, platforms, libraries, SDKs, and technology needed to build Android Wear apps. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in building Android wearable apps.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Android Wear Application Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Moore's law


Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, predicted 50 years ago that the number of transistors fitted into smaller integrated circuits would be doubled approximately every two years. That was the baseline for the explosive growth of computing powers. The size of the electronic components slowly became smaller and the processing power of the devices got stronger as time went by.

The mainframe computers, used in the early 1960s and 1970s to run enterprises and large corporations, occupied the size of a living room. They subsequently shrunk to mid-range servers and desktop computers. Integrated circuit chips and microprocessors used in computers got more and more powerful, the size of the storage devices got much smaller, and the size of the storage capacity got increased.

Desktop computers slowly transformed to become more portable in the form of laptops and notebook computers. Laptop computers are equipped with a rechargeable battery that can let users work on their computers for their personal or business needs whenever and wherever they wanted.

The Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) is used as the mobile computing device for managing contacts and performing some basic business-related tasks.

Then came the era of smartphones. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, there were some smartphones already available on the market. However, the introduction of iPhones by Apple and the subsequent launch of the Android platform by Google led the way to strong and healthy competition in the smartphone industry.

What we are seeing now in the wearable devices trend is history repeating itself. But this time, Google took an early lead in launching the Android Wear platform in 2014, whereas Apple announced its first wearable watch in April 2015.

Major companies such as Samsung, LG, Pebble, and Jawbone have all jumped onto this bandwagon with varieties of wearable device available on the market already.