Android Wear with ADM will ring out phone location

A message for you on Thursday from Andrew Flynn, software engineer, on the official Android blog: Android Device Manager, which was launched in 2013 to help find your Android phone, has a new twist. The Android blog said thus far the Android Device Manager has helped reunite almost 30 million users with their phones and tablets and has just become even more useful. Keep "watch" on your phone. In short, they announced support for Android Wear.

What that means: Android Wear will connect your phone to your wrist. This ADM-Android Wear tie will make sure it stays that way. Scenario: You're looking for your phone, somewhere in the place, but you cannot see where and you cannot remember where it was last. You say "Ok, Google. Start. Find my phone," or choose the Find my phone option in the Start menu. The phone will ring at full volume. The feature is rolling out to Android Wear devices over the next few weeks.

Google is to enable users to ask their wrist to call up a missing phone. That's great for those times when the phone accidentally falls into a basket or is buried somewhere in-between cushions or was quickly dropped into some countertop pile that escapes your memory. Josh Lowensohn in The Verge called out the convenience of the new feature for those who do get an Android Wear device: "Running around the house trying to find your phone is basically a thing of the past, at least if you have some battery life left. The same tools from Apple, Google, and Microsoft designed to curb theft can also make your phone ring, even if it's silenced. The only rub is having to make your way to a computer, or using someone else's phone to do it."

Google took that extra step out of the equation, he said, for those who have an Android Wear device. Numerous comments on the official Android blog announcement site, reacting to the announcement, amounted to "About time" and "Cool" and "Amazing. It works."

Reactions on Engadget varied from Wow, to Yawn, to Worthless tech, to "We all aim to be organized, but there are some times when it doesn't work, and it only takes a simple distraction, you put something down and you forget. I think I can count the times I have misplace my phone on one hand, but I have done it. To find it usually involves using someone elses phone to ring it and be directed by the noise. It's not pointless tech, it's just another application that can come in handy sometimes."

Matthew Miller in ZDNet said that "Android Wear support will making finding a phone even easier than logging in on a web browser and I look forward to checking it out."

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