Sony’s SmartWatch - Better than LiveView, but still needs some work.
I’ve been using my new Sony SmartWatch for about two days now trying to decide if its a replacement for my digital MetaWatch, which I’ve been wearing to work faithfully every day since I paired it with my Galaxy Nexus and found MetaWatchManager by benjymous about two months ago. The MetaWatch excels at providing glancable information on any notification that pops up on my phone, the current weather, and my next meeting. The Sony SmartWatch promised something similar, but with a color screen and more “interaction”, so I was eager to give it a try.
MetaWatch on the left, SmartWatch on the right
Right off the bat however I was a little put off by the SmartWatch’s styling. It’s very similar to Sony’s last product in this vein, the ill-fated LiveView. While the LiveView was pretty clunky looking in its all black plastic body and horrible velcro strap, the SmartWatch as a nice aluminum trim on the upper half, but then a questionable white plastic lower body and hinge. It also retains roughly the same dimensions as the LiveView, which looks rather small when wearing it on your wrist and doesn’t really look anything like a watch.
The MetaWatch, on the other hand, actually looks like a watch and doesn’t look all that strange on your wrist, other than you don’t see many people wearing digital LCD-type watches anymore. The SmartWatch seems overly bulky as well, about twice as high off your wrist as either the MetaWatch or an iPod nano. The SmartWatch isn’t awful looking, it just could be a lot better.
iPod nano on the left, SmartWatch on the right
The color display is somewhat disappointing as well. I guess I expected it to look as good as the iPod nano display, since they are about the same size, but the SmartWatch (128 x 128) has about half the screen resolution of the nano (240 x 240) and you don’t need to see them side by side to notice.
iPod nano on the left, SmartWatch on the right
Setting up the SmartWatch with my Galaxy Nexus was very simple: pair it, then load the LiveWare Manager on the phone, then from within LiveWare download the SmartWatch application. Then you enter the SmartWatch app and you can download the actual applications that get loaded to the phone. Firmware updates to the SmartWatch are also pushed via the LiveWare Manager (and there was one waiting as soon as I paired the device). The SmartWatch applications don’t show up in your App Drawer, they’re contained within the SmartWatch LiveWare application.
SmartWatch App drawer in the Liveware Manager
You configure the watch apps on your phone within the SmartWatch application view. Decide which friends you’ll get notified of Facebook updates, who’s tweets, and what city the weather app will show you the temperature and the forecast. The app design is pretty straight forward and once you’ve got the hand of one you pretty much know how to work all of them. Some apps don’t don’t have much in the way of configuration at all, they’re mainly controls like the Call Handling app, which lets you answer or dismiss a call via a tap on the SmartWatch screen, or text back a pre-configured quick reply.
Once you have your apps installed on your phone it’s time to actually use the SmartWatch. The is only one physical button on the device, the power switch on the right hand side. You have to press this first to do anything with the watch, even when the screen wakes up to display a notification icon. The only exception is when you get a call, then the phone is “awake” and you can touch a response.
I’m sure having the screen off unless you’re using the SmartWatch was born out of battery life considerations, but after using it for two days I can tell you it’s almost a deal breaker. The fact you can’t even see what time it is without pressing the button is incredibly irritating. The MetaWatch display is always on (even if it can be a bit hard to read sometimes due to its strange mirror pixel display). If the battery life is such an issue then Sony should have really considered another option like the E-Paper display used in the up-coming Pebble.
The navigation via the capacitive screen, however, is a nice touch and works well. When you activate the watch you’ll see the time (a digital clock face that for now cannot be altered - I’m guessing there will be alternate displays in future updates). A tap of the screen drops you into either the Widget View, or the App view. The watch is actually “smart” in that it remembers where you were last and will pop you right back into where you left off. Swiping up takes you to the Widgets, swiping down takes you to the App list. Swiping left or right scrolls which ever view you’re in. You select if app displays a widget via the corresponding configuration app on your phone. Tap an app or widget to interact with it. Tap with two fingers to back up.
If you tap an App icon, that app launches and you see the related information. In Facebook, it’s messages from your inbox or status updates from your news feed for the friends you’ve selected. Similarly for Twitter you can see any direct messages or tweets from the timeline from the people you follow. These apps also let you select if their notifications show up in the New Events app, which is a quick way to see the latest updates from a variety of apps without going into each app individually.
At first I didn’t know how useful seeing Facebook and Twitter notificaitions would be on the tiny watch screen, but by limiting who I was receiving notifications from (i.e. the latest news from @androidcentral) it proved to be a powerful tool. If something interesting shows up, you have the option of selecting “view in phone” which opens up the corresponding phone application, a handy shortcut. It works better with some phone apps than others, for example Plume had trouble displaying the tweet selected on the watch but the official Twitter client works perfectly.
The Music Player app displays the track currently playing on the phone, lets you adjust the volume, play/pause and skip tracks forward or backward. It is very responsive; the phone reacts to touches on the SmartWatch screen almost instantaneously. The MetaWatchManager provides similar functionality but it is much slower to respond to commands.
My favorite thing about the MetaWatch is it can be setup to display all pop-up notifications from the phone, regardless of what app they come from. You can blacklist certain apps if you like (for example I got real tired of my MetaWatch notifying me as apps were being updated from the Play Store). It is incredibly handy to see the name of the person who just sent you an email or the text of an instant message right on your wrist, leaving your phone in your pocket unless you want to respond.
And here’s where I run into my first problem with the SmartWatch - it can only display notifications from the specific apps running in the SmartWatch app list on the phone. Many of the apps I want to see notifications from don’t have Smart Extras applications yet. Some key ones are Google Voice, Gmail, or any email client other than one Sony ships on its Xperia phones.
This is a huge omission for an Android device. I realize Sony is looking out for their own handsets, but not supporting even the stock Android email client really limits the usefulness of the SmartWatch for anyone with a non-Sony phone, and even Xperia users probably use the Gmail client. Perhaps Sony thinks this will be addressed by third party developers, and a few have apps out in the Play Store so maybe it will happen, but for me this is a crippling miss for the device at launch.
The Calendar app is disappointing too. It’s really a calendar reminder app - it only displays an appointment when a calendar alarm goes off on the phone. So if you have appointments that don’t have reminder alarms set, you’ll never see it on your phone. What I want (and have on the MetaWatch) is to see my next upcoming appointment. As soon as that appointment has started, display the next event coming up. MetaWatchManager does this flawlessly for every calendar you sync to your phone.
The Weather app toggles between displaying the current weather conditions and a three day forecast, but only for the one city you configure on the phone. It have an option to use location services to give you the weather for where you currently are.
When you do get a notification on your SmartWatch, it vibrates and displays the tiny app icon that is normally displayed in the app list view. It’s comical how tiny it looks all by itself in the center of the screen, but maddening that you can’t actually tap the icon while it’s displayed to jump to the app itself. Instead you have to press the power button, tap through the clock display, and then go either to New Events or the application itself.
And that’s my biggest complaint with the SmartWatch: it takes about three times as much effort to see the same relative information as it does on the MetaWatch. The SmartWatch’s capacitive interface takes some of the chore out of it, but the idea behind these devices is “glancable” information, not drilling down to it with a series of taps and swipes. On the flip side the SmartWatch can do things the MetaWatch can’t, like reply to a tweet with a pre-configured message. If you could somehow combine the two you might have the ultimate device.
Overall the SmartWatch is a decent device, with good battery life (compared to my MetaWatch, anyway, which only lasts a day) and doesn’t seem to have any trouble staying connected to my Galaxy Nexus even when I put it in my pocket (my LiveView would instantly disconnect if it lost a clear line of site to my phone, so this is a huge improvement). It’s missing some critical apps, such as Gmail and email inbox notifications, both of which could be solved with a simple app that just pushes every pop-up notification from the phone to the watch.
If you like the design philosophy of interacting with notifications on the watch than you’ll probably like the SmartWatch a lot, and if you have a Sony phone and don’t use Gmail it might be perfect. Hopefully Sony or some third-party developers will step in soon and plug some of the application holes; for me it would be an entirely different device if I could view my email.
Here’s the funny thing. When I show people the MetaWatch and everything it can do, the average user is mildly interested (geeks, of course think its amazing). When I show those same people the SmartWatch, they gush over how cool it is. Even when I point out some of the limitations and how long it take to display the same information. I think its the color screen. iPhone users in particular seem to love it, until they find out it only works with Android devices.
The MetaWatch display is always on and is highly configurable, but sometimes hard to see due to its reflective mirror pixels.
