Android Wear smartwatches have only been available for a few weeks, but already developers have produced some excellent custom watch faces for the system. While the official SDK will be released to developers later this year to smooth over the rough edges, already it’s worth taking a look at what’s available. Let’s have a look at ten of the best watch faces for Android Wear!
Woto Watch Face
This watch face is a recreation of the stylish analogue design on the Motorola Moto 360. The face is perhaps the nicest custom analogue option I’ve seen for Android Wear so far, although it’s still possible to have larger notifications block the bottom part of the display. While the face will look better on a round dial, it still looks good on the Gear Live or G Watch.
Better Wear Face
Better Wear Face is a customisable face, which has the time and temperature in rather small print. The standout feature of the watch is being able to set a custom background, so you can do amusing things like set your own face as your watch face.
Wear LCD Watchface
Want a retro LCD watch? You can have just that with the Wear LCD watch face, which puts the look of an entire old-school LCD watch on your wrist. The face even includes those sweet feature descriptions like “ALARM CHRONO” and “WATER RESIST”, which are all technically true, I guess.
Chron
Chron is a Tron-inspired watchface, with a mixture of digital and analogue elements. Like many others, its bottom third will be covered by larger notification cards, but unobscured it’s definitely one of the sweetest looking faces available. The only downside is that the second counter disappears when the watch face sleeps, leaving something like “17:11:–“.
Matrix
Matrix screensavers were officially the coolest available a decade ago, and now you can recapture that glory with the Matrix watch face. The Matrix watch faces overlays a simple LCD-style time readout with the famous columns of letters, numbers and Japanese characters.
Binary Watch Face
This watch face is unadulterated nerd cred, even though it’s far from the most convenient watch face to read. You can choose the colour of the face, and make some other small changes too.
Terminal Watch Face
Open the terminal of your choice and type in date – you’ll get a nice little readout of the date and time. Now imagine the same thing on your watch – that’s the Terminal watch face. It’s not the most readable choice, but the glowing green on black lettering should be appreciated by most Linux nerds.
Secret Agent
If you’ve ever played Goldeneye on N64, you’ll appreciate this watch face which mirrors the one that James Bond wore in the game. While the dial is fairly obscured, it’s a faithful recreation that will definitely get a few nods in sufficiently geeky crowds.
Text
This watch face is one of the few good text-based faces available. It has words for each possible time written out, and then it highlights the relevant areas to give you the information you need. It’s a bit cluttered looking, but it’s a nice style.
StarWatch
Our final watch face is a must have for any Star Trek fan. Called StarWatch, the face mirrors the look of consoles on The Next Generation era sci-fi show, with brightly coloured geometric shapes on a black background. There’s plenty to see here too, with the time, date, and Unix epoch (seconds since January 1st 1970).