Sony, like many other tech companies, is getting heavily into the wearable market. Just this year alone, Sony has introduced three such products, the SmartWatch 3, SmartBand, and SmartBand Talk. Unlike Android on smartphones which is designed by Google and tweaked by hardware manufacturers, Android Wear is nearly 90% Google. This means that manufacturers are open to designing the hardware as they see fit with no direct oversight from Google. Software, however, is handled entirely by Google with manufacturers like Sony only given freedom over the watch faces that ship with them.

Now Google has announced an update to Android Wear that will bring along with it Wi-Fi support and a few other notable additions. After the jump, those details.

The first and likely biggest improvement to come to Android Wear will be support for Wi-Fi. Till now with all Android Wear devices, your unit, say the SmartWatch 3 had to be in Bluetooth range of your smartphone. Without the connection, functionality would be drastically reduced as the watch has no way of communicating to the web and pulling down any form of data.

All that changes with Wi-Fi support, assuming your device has Wi-Fi and luckily for Sony fans, the SmartWatch 3 has exactly that. This means that if you leave your phone in the car or on the other side of the house, the SmartWatch 3 will still allow you to send messages, get notifications, and other web-related services. This also means that if you go for a run without your phone and stop at Starbucks, SmartWatch 3 will instantly update itself and show you the things you’ve missed.

The second major update to Android Wear is Always-on apps. Till now, after a few seconds of non-usage or with your wrist dropping down, most apps would soon dim and soon after turn off your screen. With Always-on apps, your screen will simply turn black and white when the watch detects you’ve dropped your wrist, allowing the display to still show the information on screen while draining less battery.

While great, it seems like this feature will be mainly pointless for wearables with an OLED display as the power savings on a LCD unit will likely be quite minimal. In fact, you might make a case that this could reduce battery life for some as their previous expectation was that the app/display would simply go to sleep during non-usage.

The navigation flow on SmartWatch 3 will also change when the latest Android Wear update hits. Once updated, contacts and apps will be just a swipe away. Previously, accessing apps was baffling and confusing. This finally makes sense and gives you a better sense of where you are in the system. Simply tap the screen and swipe.

Perhaps the most head scratching (a.k.a we have to respond to Apple in some way) feature of the new update is the ability to respond to messages (which previously could only be done by Google Now) by using Emojis. However, instead of having a list of Emojis to scroll through, Google wants you to draw the Emoji you want on screen and their hand recognition software will interpret that and send a correlating Emoji. I hope you’ve got all the available Emojis memorized and have decent drawing skills or prepare for some awkward responses.

Other features with the latest update include

• Much like your Android smartphone, the new Android Wear update will bring pop up notifications (even when you’re looking at something else), meaning you’ll never miss anything important

• New adjustable font sizes… will let you can see more or less of the text on-screen

There is no word on when this update lands but with little to be done from hardware partners, expect a quicker rollout than you tend to see on Android smartphones.

Discuss:

What do you think about the new features headed to the Sony SmartWatch 3?

[Via Sony]