At its heart, Android Wear is a system designed to show you notification cards. It has an interface with very few visual cues to let you know how to operate it. Instead, it gives you a brief tutorial when you first set it up, teaching you the various swipes and options available to you. That setup process will be familiar to anybody who's used a smartwatch with Android before, but the permissions warnings issued as you set up notifications can be a little off-putting.

The entire system is optimized for notifications

First, you'll need to download and install the Android Wear app from Google Play, ensuring that the various supporting apps that work with it (like Keep and Google Play Services) are also up to date. Once installed, you'll need to do a quick Bluetooth pairing process and also visit Android's settings to give the watch permission to access your notifications.

Getting around Wear involves four basic swipes. You swipe up from the bottom to scroll through your notifications, swipe right to dismiss them, swipe left to access actions for each notification, and finally swipe down to access a special shade that lets you mute notifications. Instead of dealing with apps, you just act on these notifications as they come in.

Each notification presents itself as an informational card that looks like an iteration of the Google Now cards we've seen on Android and on Google search on the web. But they're slightly cleaner and easier to read — it's a design direction that gets us closer to Google's master plan to unify design across Android, Chrome OS, and the web, called "Material Design." High-minded aesthetics aside, the important thing to know is that the information presented is completely "glanceable" — it takes just a quick peek to see what the watch is telling you.

Alongside the clean notifications are subtle background cues. If a contact sends you a text, their profile photo takes over the background of the watch. If it's flight information, stylized planes appear. Weather, email, transit directions, and more all use background images to help you see exactly what's on the screen with the tiniest of glimpses. With smartphones and other smartwatches, you have to look right at them. With Wear, you just need a peek.