Tag: Android Wear

One of the great features of Chrome OS is one that few people actually use.  It’s called Smart Lock and while technically still a beta feature in the Stable channel of Chrome, it is a quick and easy way to unlock your Chromebook using your Android phone.  No longer do you have to type in your password on your Chromebook but rather, can simply walk into the room with your unlocked Android phone or click your account photo on your Chromebook to unlock it.  Setting it up is pretty easy and it can save you some time, especially if you have your phone setup as a Trusted Agent.

First, what is Smart Lock?  As the name suggests, it is a way to quickly and easily unlock your Chrome OS device by using your Android phone.  To do this, your phone and your Chromebook have to be linked and trusted with each other which is a quick five minute process.  It is a feature that has been in the Settings of Chrome OS since last year and requires that your phone be within 100 feet of your Chromebook to work.  In this How To, I’ll show you how to set it up and use it.

Android Wear 2.0 is expected to be released today but it appears to Google is already paving the way for it with other apps.  Android Pay was updated late yesterday and with it comes support for Wear 2.0.  The support for it is not explicitly called out in the release notes for the update, something that Google is notoriously bad about updating on their apps.  Rather, it is in the screenshots that are associated with the update in the Play Store.

In those screenshots, you will see round Android Wear captures of a transaction with a Bank of America card along with another screenshot of a history of transactions.

Google Fit, Google’s fitness tracking app, has received a major update that brings an all-new user experience.  For all intents and purposes, the whole app looks completely new with far more detail on the main page of the app along with more granular historical data.  Gone is the large circular indicator of steps and exercise and replacing it is a cleaner UI with your active minutes, distance, calories burned and steps across the top of the page while more detailed information is found in sections below.  This information not only shows you which days of the week you hit your step count goal, but also your activity goal and a clean, easy-to-read graph of your weight with a trend line.