![]() And listen to it on your watch’s tiny speaker. You can stream music to your watch via Bluetooth. There is no obvious volume control for notifications. You have to fumble for the button, which if like me you wear your watch on your left wrist, is quite awkward to reach. If I glance at my wrist to see the time, I’m met with a blank screen. Above all else, a watch should be two things: convenient and attractive. Headline specs when compared to the similar size 42mm Apple Watch SpecĤ50mAh replaceable (though the battery in our unit was labelled 550mAh) The app seems to die all on its own, without warning, and the only way you’ll know that is if notifications stop arriving on the watch. I deduced this meant you need Bluetooth to be switched on… With Bluetooth switched on, the app needs to be running in order for the watch to receive notifications. Informative that is, if you can read Chinese. If Bluetooth is switched off when you launch the notification app, you are greeted with the following informative message. (Sorry about the poor screen grab by the way.) You can choose to ignore notifications from certain apps, but it’s a slow and laborious process choosing which apps you do and don’t want to hear from. Sync softwareįor the watch to talk to the phone, you have to install an app. It has a pedometer, but it just doesn’t work. But both of those were such a fiddle to use, you’d be much more likely to reach for your phone. The only real exceptions were the calculator and the camera. I wish I could tell you more about the apps, but most of them made no sense. The watch is designed to be paired with a smart phone. There are some bundled apps, but most of them are useless and half of them only work if you have inserted a SIM card. There’s no app store, no access to Google Play. Of the other two, one is clumsy and the other is weird.Īs far as I can tell, this is running a bespoke version of Android. One of these faces has a full dial of Roman numerals and is designed sympathetically with the rectangular case. So you have to press the side button, to check the time. It’s an LCD display, not e-ink, and to keep the display lit permanently would be a huge battery drain. Really, what is the point of a watch that isn’t a very good watch? If I turn my wrist to check the time, but before I can see the time I have to press a button, that’s a retrograde step. ![]() ![]() Horribly irritating (loud) jingle when you first switch it on.įor me, the problem with most smart watches is the watch part.The watch comes with a screen protector pre-installed, which suggests the glass underneath will not be scratch-resistant.The case pops off easily (too easily) and the hole the screw sits in is considerably larger than the diameter of the screw. Not a huge problem, but it seems like a strange design choice because the screw is for looks only. The case has a captive screw on the back, which stands out by about 1.5mm.It’s big (13mm deep) and stands quite proud of the wrist.The watch doesn’t look quite as nice as the computer-generated photos on websites, but it’s still reasonably attractive, as smart watches go.We bought it for £32.98, but we’ve since seen it for under thirty quid. And it bears more than a passing resemblance to the Apple Watch. I recently stumbled across a smart watch, sometimes called “Aplus”, sometimes “GV18”. To achieve widespread adoption, it also needs to be affordable. As you will probably know, there a few large companies (with the Chinese snapping at their heels) searching for the holy grail of wearables: a beautiful wristpiece that is elegant, convenient, clever and durable. Like many tech enthusiasts Dummy and I have been keeping an eye on the smart watch market for a while.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |