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Android Wear watches. Anyone got one yet?
Stiggles
Posts: 9,618
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Dunno if this belongs here, but since it connects to a phone, I'll stick it here!
Anyway, just bought me one of the new Samsung Gear Live watches and got it delivered yesterday. At work just now and having my first real footer about with it and so far i love it!
The watch itself is beautifully made. Feels very premium and looks lovely. The screen is a joy to look at. It's a typical Samsung SAMOLED 1.63" 320x320 278ppi screen with lovely punchy colours. The watch is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.2GHz Quad Core msm8226 (same as the Moto G!!!) CPU with 512MB RAM and 4GB storage. Has a few sensors built in, gyroscope, compass, accelerometer and a built in Heart Rate Monitor which works well. Its IP67 certified so its water resistant and dustproof. I won't be testing out the water resistance though!
My only gripe so far is the strap. It's nice, but its not the same strap as the gear 2 and is rather fiddly to put on with one hand. Not an issue really as Samsung have made it easy to replace the straps.
Android Wear itself is fab. Pretty much just a stripped down version of KitKat, it's responsive and I've seen no sign of lag so far. Installed the Android Wear app on my Nexus 5 and it paired no problem at all. The Android Wear software is fine. Well made and looks good. Apps are a bit limited for the watch just now, but that's to be expected as it was only released a few days ago! Although having looked at the playstore as i typed this, there is another 30 or so apps now updated including paypal to work with Android Wear. As the watch has a mic built in, you can say "OK Google, do whatever" and it shall obey. Voice input seems fine and has never missed anything I've said so far.
I was going to go for the LG G Watch, but i liked the Samsung design better. It also has slightly better specs than the LG.
So in summary, I've had pretty much every smartwatches so far, and this by far is the best. I would definitely recommend one.
Anyway, just bought me one of the new Samsung Gear Live watches and got it delivered yesterday. At work just now and having my first real footer about with it and so far i love it!
The watch itself is beautifully made. Feels very premium and looks lovely. The screen is a joy to look at. It's a typical Samsung SAMOLED 1.63" 320x320 278ppi screen with lovely punchy colours. The watch is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.2GHz Quad Core msm8226 (same as the Moto G!!!) CPU with 512MB RAM and 4GB storage. Has a few sensors built in, gyroscope, compass, accelerometer and a built in Heart Rate Monitor which works well. Its IP67 certified so its water resistant and dustproof. I won't be testing out the water resistance though!
My only gripe so far is the strap. It's nice, but its not the same strap as the gear 2 and is rather fiddly to put on with one hand. Not an issue really as Samsung have made it easy to replace the straps.
Android Wear itself is fab. Pretty much just a stripped down version of KitKat, it's responsive and I've seen no sign of lag so far. Installed the Android Wear app on my Nexus 5 and it paired no problem at all. The Android Wear software is fine. Well made and looks good. Apps are a bit limited for the watch just now, but that's to be expected as it was only released a few days ago! Although having looked at the playstore as i typed this, there is another 30 or so apps now updated including paypal to work with Android Wear. As the watch has a mic built in, you can say "OK Google, do whatever" and it shall obey. Voice input seems fine and has never missed anything I've said so far.
I was going to go for the LG G Watch, but i liked the Samsung design better. It also has slightly better specs than the LG.
So in summary, I've had pretty much every smartwatches so far, and this by far is the best. I would definitely recommend one.
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Comments
Hmm, interesting. Sounds like it raises the bar for whatever Apple have got planned.
I'm tempted - would it work OK with my HTC One ?
I think the bar for phones is pretty low, just need Android 4.3. My measly Moto G passes the 'Can I run Android wear' check.
http://g.co/WearCheck
http://static.trustedreviews.com/94/751dd4/b892/knight-rider.jpg
If that was the sase you would make good use of it.
I think the Samsung and LG ones do a good 3 days light use.
http://www.oled-info.com/samsung-launches-gear-fit-smart-fitness-band-184-flexible-super-amoled
Strangely, what, if any is the difference between this band and the watch? Apart from the fact that a band is not worn where a watch fits.
I know someone at work, who has got the Samsung one (who loves it by the way, so I doubt he would be making it up) and he said it looks more like it would last 24 hours. Yes, some might manage 36 hours or even 48 hours. Same with phones, some might get 3 days out of a Nexus 5, I wouldn't.
:)The Galaxy S3 specs say it can last a full month on standby. But obviously no one has ever achieved that, at least with the standard battery.
Its all bizarre, as one media piece decided described the LG Gear as having the long battery life, whilst it is the Samsung Gear watch that I know claims 3 days usage.
Yup. Unlike the galaxy gear, this will work with all phones with android 4.3 and up
The charging thing doesn't ever bother me. I'm sleeping anyway!
I had a Gear for a while (the first one). It was handy as it acted like a 'triage' to determine whether or not the call/text/email was important enough to warrant getting my phone out of my pocket for. Depending on the whether, or work I was doing at the time, phone could be in an inside waterproof pocket. So, been able to look at the watch to see who was calling etc, was handy.
Battery life wasnt particularly good though....
Will probably get another up to date one at some point. though.
If that's handy for some people, fair enough. But to me that makes a difference of two seconds having to look at the phone. And so I couldn't justify paying that amount of money for that "privilege".
At least a tablet PC is more handy than a laptop or desktop computer and can be used independently. The watch to me looks a bit like a "glorified" notification centre.
I am not saying I would never get one, e.g. if it was part of a package I would definitely give it a try. But right now I will stick to my radio controlled and solar powered watch ;-)
Why would it be a hoax?.....
Of course, when tablets first became popular, many also derided them as pointless....
Much of my positive experience echoes what Stiggles said in the OP and generally I love the watch. As with any first generation product, though, it isn't perfect and my main issues are as follows.
Android Wear
As pretty much every review intimates, getting into apps or settings is a massive ballache. Google Keep has a companion app on AW that has the potential to be perfect, but the fact that I either have to tap and state "open Keep" or, worse, tap, scroll, tap, scroll, and tap again just to open one bloody app is a pretty poor show. I have since installed Wear Mini Launcher, which frankly Google should have included themselves, which allows me to scroll left-to-right at the top of the screen in order to bring up an app drawer.
The choice of "top" card seems arbitrary at times. I understand that if a message has just come in or a missed call, then that is the priority notification and deserves to be at the top. But other times, it can't make up its mind between the next calendar appointment, the weather, or the pedometer card. Ideally I'd like to be able to force this to be the calendar one, but there is no such option as yet.
Occasionally notifications don't clear from the watch despite clearing from the phone. If they're "sticky" notifications - Yaste remote control is a killer for this - then they are stuck on the top card of the watch until a Restart as far as I can work out.
A pernickity one, but Android Wear voice recognition - and Google's voice recognition in general - frustratingly refuses to capitalise the first word of the sentence, the word "I", or contact names. I have got used to dictating punctuation now and this works well, but the last text I dictated read "hi scott, i am on my way round now. See you shortly". One capital letter instead of four makes me look like an idiot and I don't understand how the system can be clever enough to understand exactly what I'm saying, even in fairly noisy conditions (and the recognition really is excellent), but not clever enough to know that "i" isn't a word.
LG G Watch specifically
Minor issues with the G Watch in particular. The vibrate really isn't strong or long enough - I hope there's an option to change this soon. I have missed a lot of notifications because I didn't feel the buzz, which kind of defeats the point of having the damn thing in the first place.
Charging every night is less annoying than it sounds. In fact, I prefer this than what I had with the Pebble, which did have 5 days' battery life but at about 9am on a random day I'd get the "20% battery" notification with no way of topping it up and knowing it wouldn't last the day. At least with this watch, I know it's fully charged when I set off. However, a proprietary charging stand - with currently no way of ordering a spare - means that going away requires remembering to take the charger too.
The "dim" screen is still quite bright in a dark room or cinema etc. It's a shame they couldn't have made the backlight even darker still, so that I don't have this distracting vaguely grey illumination on my wrist when it's pitch black.
Aside from these points, however, I am loving the watch so far and I'm sure things can only get better from here on in.
I'm now left wondering if the batteries are removable. If not, that 360 bit could end up referring to '360 days' battery lifespan.
I think I'll be keeping my Pebble (which is also chunky, admittedly) until the next generation of watches. I would say that the Motorola design is the best though, so I'd get the v2 360 or see what else comes onto the market, hopefully with the same idea.
I wonder if Sony will adopt Android Wear for its next smart watch? Indeed, I wonder if Pebble will have an Android Wear device out soon?
I would not call $250 cheap for a watch. Maybe looking like a watch means it 'has looks' but why the need?
A TI chip, I'll plump for it using the Cortex M4 (like the M3 but with a DSP), though it could be the M3.
Launch event September 4th?
I'll wait until I see it actually reviewed, and in particular how effective the round screen is, but if it's well-received then I can definitely see me "upgrading" my G Watch to a Moto 360. I'm guessing that for a round screen, apps ill-designed for round will do one of two things:
A) have chunks of the app, or at least its background, cut off by the 'corners' of the circle, or
be sat in a square inside the circle, with some random colour (or black) filling in the four segments
Option A means that about 21% of your content is lost. Option B means you actually end up with a screen smaller than the LG G Watch (G Watch is 1.65", so effectively 1.17" x 1.17"; M360 is 1.5", so the square would be 1.06" x 1.06"), and realistically only 64% of the screen is put to good use - 36% is then just padding.
Hopefully once the M360 is released, devs will go to work on making circle-friendly apps (I know they already can develop for these, but there isn't really an incentive to as yet).
Looking forward to seeing more info on September 4.
Well that's my useful comment of the day.
That's my useful comment of the day!
I'm really interested in the Moto 360 and it's definetely a potential buy but £300 is a hefty price to pay! That's a lot of money for any watch let alone a smartwatch.
When you have an Android phone in your pocket that tells you the time (plus all the rest), do i really want to spend £300 on an Android Wear smartwatch? That's a big hmmm for me.