554 CHAPTER 15: Developing for Android Wearable Devices
Once this add-on SDK is selected and installed, you have the additional APIs for developing for the
Sony smartwatch platform. As you can see in Figure 15-1, if you mouse over the Sony Add-on SDK,
it will tell you what API packages it contains, what version it is, and what Android API level (16) is
required in order to implement it.
This light yellow pop-up shows part of the repository URL (but not the full URL that you will need,
interestingly) used to access the Sony Add-on SDK Version 2.1. Expect a Sony Add-on SDK Version
3.0 to be released with Sony’s smartwatch 3 product sometime during 2014, unless Sony adopts the
Wear SDK, of course.
Hopefully the smartwatch 3 will have a higher screen resolution than the smartwatch 2, which had
only a 220 by 176 pixel resolution for its smartwatch display screen.
The other popular SDK and API approach to developing for Android wearables—for now this is just
smartwatches—is the Android Wear SDK, which is currently at Version 4.4W, and is now available
in Android 5.0, and will be covered in Chapter 16. The Wear SDK will be covered in detail in my
Pro Android Wearables title, which will probably be released sometime during early 2015. If you want
to check out the Android Wear SDK, here is the Android developer website’s Wear SDK URL:
http://developer.android.com/wear/index.html
The Wear SDK is similar to the Sony SDK, in that it will be installed on top of the IntelliJ IDEA
Android SDK environment, and will provide a more generalized SDK (whereas the Sony SDK
is specific to the smartwatch 2, smartwatch 3 and other Sony products) that more than one
manufacturer can utilize. I will be covering the IntelliJ IDEA in detail during Chapter 16, when
we will install Android Studio (IntelliJ IDEA), and then create a 64-bit Android 5.0 application.
It is important to note than any manufacturer can take this approach that Sony is taking, and provide
their own customized SDK Add-on API plug-ins, which they might need to do to add features that
are not currently supported in the Android Wear SDK.
Figure 15-1. The Sony Add-on SDK 2.1 installation option in the Android SDK Manager