While smartwatches do a lot of things for us like activity tracking and getting notifications from our smartphone, some also still use it for the “old school” function of looking at the time and setting up alarms. For those who have Wear OS devices, you’ll soon be getting a fresh design for this part of your smartwatch and even the clock on smartphones is also getting new widgets. This may not be a major update but it is an improvement to the simpler design of previous releases.
According to Android Police, the system clock of Wear OS devices will soon get a new fresh coat of paint, leaving behind the plain black and blue look from previous releases. The most obvious difference is on the alarm interface. The currently set times now gets a new subtle glow and the frequency list now comes in a grid shape with all the days of the week listed there. The time indicators are also getting the now Google familiar pill shape.
The changes in the timers and the stopwatch are a bit more subtle and may not even be noticeable. You’ll see a standard scroll wheel for selecting minutes and seconds instead of the previous dial interface. The new design also condenses the previously set timers while the stopwatch’s new UI looks more like that in the system phone app for stopwatches as well. Again these UI refreshes may not affect how we use the app but they may be visually refreshing for users.
For smartphones running on Android 12, you get a few new clock-related widgets. If you add them to your home screen, you get new shapes and configurations so you can choose which one suits you best or change them often according to your mood. The widgets can be customized by long pressing and choosing the edit icon. The Analog widget gets an X-shaped clock and classic-looking circles while the Digital now has transparency settings.
Android 12 users can already get the new clock layouts on their smartphones. But the Wear OS update hasn’t rolled out just yet for smartwatch users so you’ll have to wait a little longer.
