Sunday, November 8, 2015

Android wear based smart watches

I did write a post regarding the requirements of a smart watch. The smartwatch scenario now is a mess w.r.t customer. Why? Well, to start with the customer is not having best of all the worlds. We are customers and yes, we suck, we want more of everything. In fact we want everything. With the smart watch the customer has to decide what is important. Is it a plethora of pixels with miniscule battery life or a pebble. Just observe the last sentence. The former category is filled with android offerings from all the major OEMs and ofcourse, Apple. Here you will be looking at a smaller screen mobile. You have clear and crisp graphics and an OS which have been scaled down from their mobile counterparts. It is more or less two mobiles connected to each other over bluetooth. When powered on, these watches, because of their high dpi look beautiful with a hell lot of complications being programmed for the watchfaces. But then, they can be seldom on. If they are on, all the time. the watch wont even last 1 - 2 hours. What a big joke that would be and is. So majority 99% of the time, the screen is plain black. If the watch is drawn towards you, then it swithces on and displays the watchface in full beautiful complete color palatte. After a momentary flash, the screen goes blank. If you missed what you wanted to read, you have to click the power button or just shake your hand again.

Let me first talk about an android wear watch. What better watch than the moto 360. The hardware is drop dead gorgeous(Yes, we may differ here, I know, I know). But for me the steel one is awesome. It can double up as a designer bracelet(since the screen is black most of the time). The steel chain is designed beautifully. The screen is awesome. The gripe with the moto 360 appearance is the flat tyre. The dark area at the bottom end of the circular display, housing the Ambient sensor. The ambient sensor is a requirement since without it we would be staring at a bright screen, any time of hte day. The ambient sensor does its job. The flat tyre looks ridiculous on perfecly round watchfaces which require the entire circular dispay. There are many watchfaces which use the flat tyre to come up with some of the most innovative watchfaces. For these watchfaces, the flat tyre suddenly become a feature.

The major issue for android wear based watches are the OS, is totally buggy. Some or the other core app crashes regularly. Frequent reboots are the order of the day. And you know, the funniest thing is You have to factory reset the watch every time you have to connect a new phone. just imageine the situation for a rom flashaholic like me to connect the watch every time I flash a new rom on my phone. You are lucky if you get one full day of juice from your android watch.

Every android watch manufacturer are out with their second iteration and all still run 5.1.1. This during a time Marshmallow was released. I was expecting at least one of the second gen watches to come out with Android 6.0, What with the "doze" feature of the new version of android. This just shows that google is not that serious with its watch operating system. Android wear still had the first to customer advantage compared to an apple watch. But, the apple watch's interface looks more polished than the android one. Google has to put serious effort to bring wear to apple's standards. The 360 second generation has gone the traditional way when it comes to the design and look of the watch. I think motorola is afraid of that the watch companies are going to just stamp a smart watch OS on the existing hardware which in turn answers the traditional design of the watch, to look, more like a watch. The first generation is still the winner when it comes to looks and radical design. When it comes to android watches the colors are bright, text is crisp, It is a small phone. I think the next gen android watches will support direct voice calls.

I think all the future smart watches should have a traditional watch mechanism layer so that I can still use my watch without worrying about the charge remaining. The next gen android design should allow this somehow.

The next post will discuss a watch which has been the leader in this segment for a very long time...........

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