Have some decent time under my belt with this… some more thoughts:

• The GPS navigation implementation is utterly and completely terrible. It is seriously a hazard and will definitely get someone killed. There is no good way to look at the small display on your wrist while driving safely. I pretty much rely on the spoken instructions from my phone. The vibration on my wrist is somewhat useful tho.
• This leads me directly to my next observation about Android Wear in general… Continue reading →

Some more thoughts:

• The apps aren’t as useless as they are on the Pebble. Still waiting for some truly compelling functionality though.
• Navigating a device on a screen that small isn’t easy and it seems Google wants to simply that process by making it voice-centric. Thing is, don’t know if I am in the minority, but I just feel like a huge dork talking into my wrist. Unless I am alone in the car or perhaps at home with my 5 year old (who gets a huge kick out of me talking to my gadgets) I am just NOT going to do this. That being said, there are some really good third party launchers available in the app store which address a lot of this issue. I am actually impressed at how quickly something this polished is in the Play Store.
• The general difficulty in launching apps combined with the limited screen real estate for usable interfaces confirms my thoughts that watches are not going to be good for much more than notifications as the primary value-add. Am sure this will change as the market matures and app developers come up with novel ways of interacting, but in the near term, this is not something likely to change fundamentally.
• The watch looks good indoors but it’s just too damn cold for me to go outside and see how it looks in full sunlight. Am curious about this.
• One really big win this watch has over my Pebble is that in addition to telling me who is calling, it allows me to very easily send a SMS reply instead of answering. I can’t figure out how to customize the messages though. It seems like it should take the auto-messages which I customized on my phone but it doesn’t.
• This brings me to (what seems to be a continuing series), notification hell – oh my god, how many times is it going to tell me the damn weather?? Seriously, it seems to flash me the weather cards every hour! And I’m in Austin, I don’t give a damn what the weather in Round Rock is (or vice versa). Seems like it should be a pretty fix to only show me the weather in the location I am in. On the phone, showing me both all the time is fine as I can easily see and easily scroll past it. Here I have individually swipe each away… constantly. On the phone you can easily scan the small icons at the top to know what new notifications you need to pay attention to, here the card on top peeks out, dying to be selected. You can’t ignore it!

Ok, I definitely slept through the alarm. The vibrate is really weak! So much so that this almost feels like a show stopper for me. The Pebble had an alarm which could wake the dead. I liked being able to set an alarm that wouldn’t bother the wife or 2 year old.

It’s interesting how the watch is able to maintain the claim of “all day battery” and “always on display”. While there are many good looking, slick and shiny watch faces, it goes into a simplified (largely) black and white version of said face most of the time. Only when you touch the face (or supposedly lift it up to look at it – this worked marginally well and was slow when it did) did it give you the full color version. So the net effect is, most of the time you are looking at a monochrome display. While the resolution of the display is obviously better than the Pebble, the overall effect is actually not that much better.

It does charge quickly tho, I can go from 0 to 75% in maybe half an hour.

Notification Hell

Ok, these notifications are getting really annoying. Google Now on the phone works really well because you can easily scan many cards quickly and zero in on the important one with relatively little effort. It is a very cool effect delivering you very important/relevant information quickly. Not so much on the watch. There is no easy scanning of multiple notifications quickly, you have to scroll through and swipe away each one separately. This is damn annoying. One of the the key things I liked about my Pebble was that it was strategic to not overwhelm and only show notifications which were actually important (not sure if this was intentional or unintentional due to limited app/OS support – in any case, it was good).