i’m Watch Review: I Waited 7 Months for THIS?!

Let’s just get this out of the way: the i’m Watch is a terrible product and one you should avoid at all costs. 

I ordered my i’m Watch Black March 1st, 2012, and received in early September

Forget all the issues with questionable selling practices and product delays that have enraged purchasers (Blue Sky i’m SpA took people’s money for over a year without shipping a product), many of which accused the i’m Watch of being some sort of scam. Forget it’s stupid name. Instead focus on the complete lack of functionality that makes it next to useless. 

The hardware itself is fairly attractive; I have a first-generation MetaWatch and while it is fantastic from a functional standpoint it’s pretty geeky looking on your wrist. I also have a Sony SmartWatch, which looks more like a plastic toy than a watch. In comparison, the i’m Watch has an nicely designed case with a curved glass screen (which the company touts up so much you’d think it’s a cure for cancer) and looks good on your wrist. While it’s somewhat bulky, the case is made from aluminum and is surprisingly light. The silver links that mate the case to the strap have the i’m Watch logo on them and are somewhat gaudy, but overall it’s a slick looking package.

From left to right: MetaWatch, i’m Watch, Sony SmartWatch

The 1.54 inch, 240 X 240 color display has a 220 ppi pixel density and looks sharp. The capacitive touch screen is very responsive. The watch case has openings on each side for the stereo speakers (which means it is no way imaginable water-proof, and “water resistant” is questionable) and there is a single button for power, waking up the display, and exiting apps, on the top right-hand side. The left side has the headphone jack, which also serves as the charging and data transfer port. A special USB to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter must be used to charge the phone and transfer data, such as pictures and music, to the watch.

The power/back button on the right side, speaker grill

That headphone jack is where stuff starts to go wrong. When I first received my watch I couldn’t get it to charge. Turns out the USB adapter cable really needs to be jammed into the headphone jack to make a connection. Transfer speeds from your computer to the watch over that connection are abysmal.

Headphone/data/power jack; speaker grill. Note the curvature of the screen.

When you power on the i’m Watch you’ll find all the available apps are pre-loaded. The main home screen shows the Android notification bar at the top, the digital time and date, weather info for the first city you’ve configured (more on that later), and three app icons at the bottom. You can choose what apps show up there (or any of the other app “slots” on the screens to the right) by long-pressing an icon and then selecting a different app from the pop-up list. From the main screen if you swipe left you get a system screen that lets you go into settings, the app drawer, adjust volumes, or display the analog-looking watch face. Swiping to the right lets you scroll through four screens that let you load four app icons per screen.

Access notifications by swiping down from the top of the screen

The key thing to understand about the i’m Watch is that it is actually an Android device, running a custom version of Android 1.6 (Donut), which is lightweight and runs in very little RAM. The i.Mx233 CPU has a maximum clock speed of 450 MHz with 64MB of RAM. My model has 4GB of onboard storage, however after the software is loaded it reports only 3GB available for my personal files. 

The difference between the i’m Watch and devices like the MetaWatch and the Sony SmartWatch is that the i’m Watch is an Android computing device, running all of it’s apps locally on the watch. The MetaWatch and the SmartWatch are really just extended displays for your smartphone; apps run on your phone and the data is displayed on the watch. The MetaWatch and the SmartWatch don’t need to connect directly to the internet, all the heavy lifting is done by your phone.

The i’m Watch only uses you’re phone for two things: a connection to the Internet via bluetooth tethering, and acting as a wrist-mounted speakerphone (again via bluetooth). Through the Calls app you can initiate or accept calls from your phone and then if you choose you can hold your conversation by yelling at your watch and then straining to hear the other party through the watch’s speakers. I guess it would be useful if you used your phone a lot for calling and just wanted to leave it in your pocket or purse. 

The first thing any device like this must be able to do is tell the time. Glance at your i’m Watch and usually what you’ll see is a black screen. The vibrant color screen sucks power from the 450 mAh battery at an alarming rate so by default the screen times out after 15 seconds. Through the settings menu you can set the timeout as low as 5 seconds to several minutes or “never”, however on anything over 30 seconds will impact the battery life dramatically. 

So most times you’ll have to press the power button to see what time it is, which can be annoying if you’re hands are full. The i’m Watch doesn’t have an ambient light sensor so it can’t adjust the brightness outside automatically which can make it difficult to read in direct sunlight. 

Oh, and that nice analog watch face that i’m Watch touts on their website? Well, it exists, but it’s an app. You can’t set it as the default, you have to go to the system pane, select the app, it loads up and whenever you activate the screen you’ll see it. However you can’t access any other watch functions or apps unless you quit the analog watch face app. So, kinda useless.

But the biggest problem with the i’m Watch are the apps. First off, there’s no way to display SMS messages or general notifications from your phone on the watch. Notifications could be considered optional, but I don’t know how you sell a device like this without text message functionality. i’m Watch doesn’t either; they advertised the watch as having SMS display capability, and now it’s “coming soon”. 

Next, even thought this is an Android device, there’s no “app store” - no way to search for or install apps directly from the watch itself or via a web storefront. So far all app updates and new apps (i’m Watch recently added a calculator) have to be loaded via a firmware update. Again, the i’m Watch was sold to customers as having an app store - once again, it’s “coming soon”. 

And while the apps themselves are “running” on the watch, you can’t setup or configure them on the watch. All data and settings for the apps are contained within the “i’m cloud”, which you access through a web browser. Not on the phone of course - the i’m Watch doesn’t sport a web browser itself. You need to log into i’m cloud using your Google account and then register your watch, linking it to your Google account. Then you can go to the Apps page where you can configure each application. 

The basic premise of the system is you configure your information in i’m Cloud, which then connects to the services you specified and pulls information from them, storing that information in i’m Cloud. The i’m Watch then connects to i’m Cloud via bluetooth Internet tethering through your phone at either 15, 20 or 30 minute intervals (there’s no concept of “push” on the i’m Watch) to display information in each app stored in the i’m Cloud. If there is new data in the i’m Cloud apps when the watch syncs, it will display a notification. The notification panel is accessed just like the notification panel on an Android phone, by swiping down from the top of the display, and you can also invoke a manual sync from there.

It’s when you start configuring the apps you find the major limitations with the i’m Watch. Appointment can only sync with a single Google calendar. Use Exchange, Yahoo, or even Facebook for appointments? Forget it. The Appointment app will send notification alerts to your watch, however. The i’mail app is just as bad - it supports only a single email account and it must be accessible via a single “host” and port address. I was able to successfully configure i’mail to work with my Yahoo account, which is my primary personal account, but by doing that I can’t view my gmail or corporate Exchange account.

The Appointments app configuration screen in i’m Cloud

And actually I’d be uncomfortable connecting my Exchange account to i’m Cloud, because it seems that the i’m Cloud website is essentially caching information from the sites it connects to in order to enable the i’m Watch to display the information. None of this looks very secure at all. 

i’m Mail email application

Anyway, if you tap an application like i’mail or i’m Tweet on the watch, it will open up and show you the latest information it has synced. For the i’mail app, this is usually the last 10 emails received, showing the sender, subject and maybe a line or two from the email body. There’s no option to set how much email is downloaded to the watch, nor can you “open” any of the emails and see the entire message. The same with the News app, which lets you configure three “topics” from different world regions, such as Nation, Sci Tech, Business, etc., but all you get is a headline and the source it came from. 

The Weather app configuration screen

i’m FB, the Facebook app, is even more worthless - it can only display Facebook notifications that you have configured on the Facebook website. It doesn’t display the newsfeed, your wall, or anyone else’s wall. Again, once you see a notification like “so and so posted a new photo”, you can’t view anything related to the notification on the watch itself. 

This is the big frustration with the i’m Watch - it’s an on-line Android device that can’t actually do anything with the data it receives. The Sony SmartWatch gives you the option to open emails, Facebook notifications or Twitter tweets on your phone so if the watch notifies you of something that piques your interest, you can view the details in their entirety. Since there’s no companion app for the watch running on your phone, it can’t actually communicate or “do” anything with your phone, other than use the standard dialer profile that other bluetooth speakerphone devices utilize. The i’m Watch is just a tease when it comes to your data.

You can display pictures on the i’m Watch in a couple of ways. If you’re a Google Picasa user (I’m not), you can enter your account information and a single specific album and you can use the i’mages app to display those pictures on the watch. Or, you can transfer pictures from your computer to the watch’s onboard storage and display those images via the i’m gallery application. i’m gallery is a decent app that supports zooming and panning, and while pictures look good on the watch screen I’m not sure what the value of that is if I already have my phone handy. 

My Lynx B race car displayed via the i’m Gallery app

The i’m Tweet app was probably the most useful as far as the Twitter feed information displayed, other than it only shows you 20 or so tweets. You can’t click on links, see pictures or click through hashtags, however. You can’t filter the feed to specific Twitter users either, a nice feature of the Twitter app for the Sony SmartWatch. The other available i’m Cloud apps are Weather (track three cities current temperature and vague three day forecast for each, but has no idea of your current location), Stocks (tracks three stocks), and the bizarre i’music.

i’music is touted as a huge online music service exclusively for i’m Watch users. If you read the info on the website it sounds like you can select songs from an online catalog to download to your watch. i’m Watch is currently including the service for free, and after trying to use it I can’t imagine anyone ever paying for it.

The only way to get songs is to enter a search criteria on the website, such as a song title or artist name. This will produce a “channel” of available songs that i’music thinks match your search parameters. I entered “AC/DC” into the search box and i’music returned a list of 5 songs from Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Kiss, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Scorpions, and Iron Maiden (no actual AC/DC tracks, but it got the gist). Now when you open the i’music app on your watch those 5 songs are listed in the app and you can download them to the watch’s memory storage. Want to download some different songs? You have to go back to the i’m Cloud website, do another search, see if you get what you want, then go back to your watch and select the songs to download. No streaming via i’m cloud is supported.

Sound terrible? It is.

i’music configuration screen

I have no idea why anyone would want to store music on the i’m Watch and use it as an MP3 player, but if you really do, there’s a much better way to do it than using i’music. The watch has a decent media player app that will play any music you transfer from your computer via the USB adapter. You can list your music by song, album, artist or playlist, scroll through tracks, scrub through tracks by dragging the progress bar, etc. This is actually the most functional app on the watch, and the sound through the watch’s stereo speakers is surprisingly good, but there is some distortion at the maximum volume. Of course you can always use headphones for the best sound quality. It would be nice if the watch supported bluetooth headphones, but it only supports a single bluetooth device at once, and since you have to connect it to your phone for Internet …

i’media player app album view

Which brings up an interesting point about the i’m Watch - it really has nothing to do with your smartphone at all. If the i’m Watch supported Wi-Fi it would never need to be connected to your phone unless you needed a remote Internet connection. So don’t think of the i’m Watch as a “smartphone accessory”; think of it as a limited Internet appliance you can wear on your wrist that can only connect to the Internet via a bluetooth connection. 

Other observations:

- To register your watch (which you must do in order to use any of the i’m Cloud apps) you have to enter in it’s product ID - the ID listed on the back of the watch is only the first 5 characters, and if that’s what you enter in the website you’ll get an error.

- I hate that the watch doesn’t use a standard microUSB for charging or data transfer. That means you have to have the special cable with you to charge or load files. The MetaWatch and the Sony SmartWatch also use special connectors, but it’s because they don’t want any openings in the watch case itself that dirt or water could enter. The i’m watch has two speaker holes and the headphone jack. 

- The “clock” function of the i’m Watch doesn’t take advantage of it’s Internet connection to set the time; you must manually set it yourself. The i’m Watch does now have a simple world time app and it does update the time for daylight savings. 

- The first time I setup my Google Account with i’m Cloud it took several hours for the watch to “link” to my account.

- A few days after receiving my watch a notification popped up saying the firmware was out of date. The i’m Cloud website also reported my watch’s firmware was out of date, but there was no new update to install on the watch. It did finally show up a few weeks later.

- Watch updates are not “over the air” - you must download a file from the i’m Watch support website, transfer it to your watch via the USB connection, then reboot the watch at which point it will install the update.

- Data transfer speeds over the USB-3.5mm headphone connector are horrendous, about 1MB per second. It takes several minutes to transfer a single MP3 album to the watch’s onboard storage.

- You can’t transfer any files via bluetooth to the watch.

- You can’t play videos on the watch.

- Many of the apps advertised on the i’m Watch website are still not available.

- There’s no vibration motor in the watch, so in silent mode you’ll never know you have a notification until you manually check the watch.

- While music sounds fine via the watch’s speakers, the sound quality of phone calls was poor, with voices cutting out constantly by what seems to be the noise cancellation software. Callers on the other end said I sounded fine; they said my speech was clear but there was a lot of background noise. 

- There’s a bug where plugging the watch in to charge it activates the watch display, and it never turns off. This means it takes forever to charge the watch since it’s powering the display while charging.

- I never could get the Address Book to work. Theoretically it’s supposed to download all your contacts from your phone to the watch, so you can use the watch dialer to call people. Every time I tried to sync my address book info the app just spun forever, accomplishing nothing.

- Technical support is unavailable - you must enter your product code and serial number, but no matter what you enter you’re told you have an invalid ID. I also received no response via email or Twitter.

To sum it up, the i’m Watch is a $420 (in it’s cheapest, “i’m Color” configuration) Internet device that requires a smartphone (of near equal value) to provide its Internet connection, doesn’t notify you of SMS messages, and other than acting as a speakerphone you wear on your wrist, provides extremely limited data functionality of almost no value. It’s quicker to pull your phone out of your pocket then get information from the i’m Watch. Maybe the hackers over at XDA can figure out a use for this thing, but as it stands now I can’t recommend the i’m Watch for anyone. 

If you want instant, glanceable information, check out the new Strata by MetaWatch. If you want an interactive experience, look at the Sony SmartWatch. Both of those options are less than a quarter of the cost of an i’m Watch but provide way more functionality. 

Sony SmartWatch: View in Phone is nice, but what I really want is Send to Pocket

One of the cool things the Sony SmartWatch can do is open up a Twitter or Facebook page on your phone. For example when viewing a Twitter notification on the SmartWatch you can scroll down and click the arrow button, which gives you the option to View in Phone, Reply with a pre-determined message you’ve setup on the phone, or Retweet the message. 

If you click View in Phone (shouldn’t that be View on Phone, btw?), it almost instantly pops up the tweet in the application you’ve defaulted for the action (in my case, the official Twitter app for Android). Its one of the things that is very impressive when I demo the SmartWatch to people.

Plume is actually the main Twitter app I use on a daily basis on my Galaxy Nexus, but I selected the official Twitter app for View in Phone because when the tweet is displayed its a single press to get to the Android “Share” menu. Why do I care about that? Because 99% of the time the reason I’m viewing the notification on my phone is so I can add whatever it is to Pocket so I can “read it later”.

Pocket or any other read it later service is exactly what the SmartWatch was made for. In a perfect world, I would scroll through my Twitter notifications on my watch and the ones that were interesting I’d just “Send to Pocket”, without any need to actually do anything on my phone. As it is now, I first have to open the tweet on my phone, then pull up the Share menu, then select Pocket. 

What I’d like to see the Sony Smart Extras team do is update the SmartWatch Twitter app to have a “Share” button. On the phone you’d go in the app and select Share To and then using the standard Android Share menu select the service you want the Share function to default to (in my case I’d pick Pocket). Then when I see an interesting tweet I want to follow up on later, I’d click the arrow button, press the Share button, and then know when I pull up Pocket later on my phone, tablet or computer that article or post will be there waiting for me.

I like using Pocket because it doesn’t just put the tweet in my list, it actually grabs whatever is linked in the tweet as well (I usually only send tweets that are linking to articles, i.e. tweets from AndroidCentral, Daring Fireball, Engadget, etc.). 

Seems like the perfect marriage of technology, I hope someone makes it happen.

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 vs. SmartWatch
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.