Face like an abandoned pie: what to do with Android watch faces? – The Australian Financial Review

But they’re rivals in the sense that the Apple Watch tends to put Android watches to shame, especially when it comes to the faces to choose from when first setting up the watch.

For those of us feeling a bit let down by Samsung and Google’s lack of attention to the face, all is not lost, however. If you have the time and a modicum of technical know-how, it’s not that hard to give your Watch5 Pro a facelift yourself.

Samsung provides a software package known as WatchFace Studio which allows you to design your own watch face from scratch. It’s aimed at professional software developers who plan to sell their watch faces, but it’s not that difficult to use.

And it lets you download your creations directly to your watch, via your home Wi-Fi connection, meaning you can use it to create replicas of your favorite watch faces without having to worry about them breaking the copyrights and trademarks.

I just spent the morning learning how to use WatchFace Studio and creating a Wear OS replica of one of my all-time favorite watch faces. Although there are still a lot of improvements I could make – the colors are a bit too bright, and the low power version of the face, which is supposed to use darker colors, is still quite ugly – I was Already made me feel a little better about wearing the Samsung watch.

A few more hours, and I think I’ll have it nailed. One weekend creating watch faces, and I’d have all the choices I want. Think of it as a hobby, for those of you with some spare time.

Or, more specifically, time on your wrists.

It’s not just the time that your Samsung Galaxy Watch5 will tell you, of course. Like last year’s model, the new model has biometric sensors on the back to measure data such as heart rate, ECG and body temperature, and it can be used with an appropriate blood pressure cuff. (which you will need to calibrate the Samsung watch from time to time) to also estimate your blood pressure.

We’ve never been big fans of the data spewed out by wrist-mounted biometric devices. Every expert we interviewed told us that the wrist is one of the worst places on the body to try to take such measurements. But Samsung says it’s working to improve the accuracy of those measurements, mostly by making the sensors bigger than ever.

It’s not a claim we’ve had a chance to assess, however. We were stuck at the first hurdle, the watch face itself.

But a few more tweaks…