Up close and personal with the beautiful Huawei Watch [VIDEO]

One of the first surprising stories to come out of Mobile World Congress this year was a beautiful smartwatch made by an unlikely source. The Huawei Watch was officially announced on Sunday, and we’ve been dying to get a closer look at it. We were finally able to check out this device in the flesh, and now we’re even more excited about it.

The Huawei Watch is a round Android Wear device, but with one big difference. Current round smartwatches have some sort of trade-off for the display. The Moto 360 has the infamous “flat tire,” and LG’s watches have completely round displays, but a lot of bezel around them. Huawei has managed to make a completely round display with not a lot of bezel. It looks like a legit watch.

The display is 1.4-inch AMOLED with 286ppi. It’s powered by a 1.2GHz Qualcomm processor, and has 4GB of storage, 512MB of RAM, 300mAh battery, and a 6-axis sensor for fitness tracking. The Huawei Watch will be sold in 20 countries (including North America), but we don’t know when it will go on sale or how much it will cost. When it does go on sale it will be available in black, silver, and gold. This might be the best looking Android Wear device to date.

Use Appeer to get Android apps from Google Play based on custom tailored personal social recommendations

Appeer from Austin, Texas, launched their Android app recommendation platform today. Appeer aims to create a personalized app discovery experience for it’s users, by utilizing an algorithm for app recommendations versus your typical methods found on Google Play, such as browsing through popular app categories (which can sometimes be worthless crap). Appeer prides themselves on providing organic app recommendations instead of sponsored recommendations found on similar platforms. So, how does it work? Let’s find out.

Appeer looks and feels much like a cross between a social networking app and your average app store. You’ll find your own personal recommendations, which are custom tailored for you, based on who you’re following, and the apps that you currently have installed. If 3 or more people have an app that you don’t have, the app gets recommended to you. You can find people to follow on your own for recommendations, though Appeer will automatically follow users that appear to be similar to you based on the apps and games that you have installed.

While it’s nice to have the app automatically find new followers for you, I’d prefer being able to follow friends that I already follow across other social networks like Google+, Twitter, or Facebook. Sure, you can tell all of your friends to follow you by providing them your username or sharing your profile URL, but it would be nice if this feature was built in and done automatically for you as part of the profile building and social discovery process. The developers did mention that this was the ultimate goal and may be coming in a future update.

Your timeline is your social app stream, which gets populated by recommendations through your social circle. Once you find an app you’d like, you can tap on the app to read more, and then continue on to the Play Store for installation. If you’d like to save the app for later, you can tap the bookmark icon, and the app will be moved to that section for safe keeping. Additionally, you’ll receive push notifications that appear in the status bar that allows for easy bookmarking.

Finding new apps can sometimes be difficult given the sheer size of the Google Play Store along with the amount of new applications hitting the store on a daily basis. Is Appeer something that I’ll continue to use in the long run? I’m not sure, but for now, it’s an interesting idea and the whole swarm notification feature is pretty cool too. To get started, head on over to the Google Play Store to install Appeer. Good luck!

Microsoft confirms Cortana personal assistant is coming to Android this summer

Microsoft today announced that Windows 10 will support Cortana integration not only with their own smartphone, but also for those using Android phones or the iPhone. The functionality will come as part of the OS upgrade happening later this summer.

Microsoft Cortana is a voice assistant service, not all that dissimilar to Siri or Google Search + Google Now. Cortana is actually pretty good at what it does, with some people willing to give it the throne of best voice assistant.

So what’ll it bring? Here’s a quick look at the feature set Microsoft is boasting:

• You can have Cortana remind you to pick up milk the next time you’re at the grocery store, and then your phone will wake up and buzz with the reminder.


• You’ll be able to ask about the weather.


• Or sports scores.


• Or anything else you would head to a search engine for.


• You’ll be able to track a flight using Cortana on both your phone and your PC, and get the updates on the device that you’re on so you don’t miss anything.


• Everything in Cortana’s Notebook will show up across all your devices and any changes you make on one device will be reflected when you use Cortana on any of your other devices.


• The Cortana companion app will help you complete tasks you begin on your PC wherever you are, on your phone.

Unfortunately Android and iOS users won’t be enjoying some of the other things made possible by owning a Windows phone, such as being able to toggle settings. That sort of stuff requires more open access to system settings which Microsoft doesn’t have. Regardless, it’s better than having nothing at all.

Microsoft also detailed some of the other Windows 10 integration being worked on, including syncing your files across devices with OneDrive and being able to play music stored in OneDrive through the Xbox Music app. It all sounds great and we can’t wait for it to arrive.

So when will it happen? Microsoft says a new preview version of Windows 10 is heading out in a few weeks, and the Cortana apps for mobile should be out by the end of June. That’s not a long wait and you can bet we’ll be checking it out to see if it can’t steal us away from Google Now.

[via Microsoft]