The honeymoon is definitely over. I wake up next to my LG Watch Urbane and don't feel that same urge to feel it on my wrist that I used to have, and it's a while now since I pulled my sleeve cuff back just to steal an admiring glance at it.
Alan Williams | 21st July 2015 | 5 Minute Read
Instalment two of my long term road test of the LG Watch Urbane (where I realise that I'm still an early adopter)
The honeymoon is definitely over. I wake up next to my LG Watch Urbane and don't feel that same urge to feel it on my wrist that I used to have, and it's a while now since I pulled my sleeve cuff back just to steal an admiring glance at it. It has become everyday.
So are we still friends? Have we learned to live with each other successfully?
We have. But whilst it's still my first choice in the mornings over my trusty surf watch, there are occasions now when I pick the Ripcurl over the LG. I'm not surprised by this, and I'm still pretty pleased with my purchase, but it's time to share what I've learned.....
What's still good?
The key usage benefits I reported on last time are still the standout ones. In order those are:
These are all very practical and have changed the way that I use my rather unwieldy Samsung Note 4 phablet which in retrospect is far too big to handle comfortably. I don't ever input anything on the watch except for asking it to tell my phone to call people from my phone address book when I'm in the car (which the phone can do as well of course). I've installed all manner of other apps and plenty of watch faces, but with one exception that I'll talk about later they've not become part of my life.
If there weren't the disadvantages that I've discussed below, then getting a watch of this sort (or the Apple Watch) would be on everyone's birthday or Christmas wish list.
So, what could be improved?
Quite a lot of things. In all honesty, this is still early adopter technology. Those of us who are nerds (and there are plenty of us, which is what the manufacturers are relying on) will accept the compromises, but most of us would be fooling ourselves if we say that we're completely happy. Here are my top 5 gripes (and the list is longer than that...)
Any pleasant surprises?
As it happens, yes! Much to my delight I found an Android Wear browser called WIB, the Wear Internet Browser by appfour. It is, amazingly, quite functional and efficient.
You might quite reasonably ask, "Why the hell would you want a browser on a watch?" because there's no way you should want to browse websites and surf when on such a small device with no keyboard.
The reason is simple. You can run web apps. One afternoon I took a couple of hours to develop a simple forms-based app in one of our BlinkMobile answerSpaces. The scenario was very specific, an activity-based app that would ask the user to answer two or three questions (with conditional behaviour) by ticking boxes and then submit a record into a back end system database and produce a pdf to email to a document management system.
Easy as pie to develop and all the back-end processing is done at the server side. The watch works really well as a simple input device for particular activities when handling a phone would be more difficult. What surprised me was that the WIB browser doesn't drain much battery and is crisply efficient. The app worked really well.
In summary
After two months with the LG Watch Urbane I'm willing to continue with the compromise because the benefits of the good features outnumber the irritations of the things that need improving. I'm hoping that software upgrades may come along to sort out the notifications issues and the flipping into settings mode. The other ones I'll have to live with.
I suspect that over the next 12 months the watch face issues and battery life will be sorted out on the best of the new watches and then the Smart Watch will live up to both parts of its name.