One of the benefits of working for ETS is that we occasionally get hold of toys to play with, recently a box of LG G Watches turned up so I grabbed one to have a play with.
Previously I’ve one of the first iteration of Android linked “smart watches”, namely the Sony Liveview. The first version of these really were not great, especially the fact that only the very edges of the screen were touch sensitive didn’t help interacting with them. And the strap wasn’t that comfy so all in all not a good experience.
The LG G seams much better out of the box, the whole screen is touch surface and it has a look and feel much closer to a modern digital watch. The set up process was relatively painless (once I’d overcome some local issues with the office wifi), there was the now usual immediate device update that all modern devices seam to suffer from, but it didn’t take that long.
So far I’ve just been wearing it in the office having it pop up new mail, sms and calendar notifications at the same time as my phone, but I’m out of the office with a research partner for the next 3 days so it will be interesting to see if it’s useful while I’m on the road. There seams to be a deep integration with Google Now which should be useful.
The biggest thing that will determine how useful the whole Android Wear idea is going to be battery life, I’ll keep an eye on it and see how long it lasts.
I also need to have a look at the API to see if I can come up with something fun to do with it and the sensors contained in the device. I do know that the notifications from Tracks2Miles are showing up.
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