Pros & Cons
A great geek gift, especially for someone with Android development skills, Sony's new SmartWatch ($149 direct) is a little screen on your wrist with infinite possibilities. It's cute, well-designed, and certainly the least embarrassing tech watch I've seen, and I reviewed the gigantic Fossil Palm watch in 2005. So I know from big, ugly tech watches.
The SmartWatch is still more tech than watch, though. It's definitely in beta. It's open. It's absolutely begging you to write apps for it, and to enhance and fix the ones that are there. For some people, this will be really exciting. Others should probably get a timepiece that isn't dependent on Bluetooth pairing.
Physical Design and Functionality
The Sony SmartWatch is actually a clip, a cheerful little 1.4 by 1.4 by 0.3 inch (HWD), .55-ounce square of white plastic with chromed edges and a button on the side. You could clip it to a bag strap and forget the whole wrist thing if you want. But it comes with a perfectly nice, durable, comfortable rubber watchband in one of six fun colors. (Additional bands cost $19.99 each.) It'll fit on many other standard watch bands, too. Clipped onto the band, it's secure, and it looks far more watch than smart. It practically looks like a Swatch.
I've been wearing the SmartWatch for a week around town, and I've been getting positive comments about it. A guy at a coffee shop pronounced it cool. My six-year-old daughter thought for a while and said slyly, "your watch…is like a phone." She considered that to be pretty deep.
The watch's face, alas, is its one big miss. It's a dim 128-by-128, 1.3-inch OLED panel that is frustratingly difficult to read in sunlight. It's fine indoors, the natural habitat of this watch's core clientele, and I've managed to live with it on for an entire weekend out when I got the most awful farmer's tan, complete with watchband stripe. But it sure ain't bright.
The little face is a multi-touch screen, and that's how you operate the SmartWatch. The SmartWatch works with a wide range of Android phones, linking up via Bluetooth 2.0 (or higher) to display different kinds of information on the screen. I tested the SmartWatch with a T-Mobile HTC Sensation. No, it doesn't work with iPhones.
Unlike Motorola's MotoActv ($249, 3.5 stars), the SmartWatch is not running Android itself and doesn't have any user-accessible, onboard storage. It's a terminal rather than a computer. Your Android phone runs a free app called LiveWare Manager and downloads other plug-ins from the Android Market. I was able to get 12 up and running: Text Messages, Phone Book, Facebook, Twitter, Find Phone, Music Player Remote, Calendar Reminders, Weather, Missed Call Notification, Call Handling, Phone Battery/Signal Status, and Gmail Notifier. In the most extreme possible world, you can load up to 255 widgets at once.
Tap twice, sharply, on the watch's face, and it'll display the time. Swipe up and you'll get the most recent notification: for instance, "New Gmail 21 Minutes Ago" (although unlike with text messages, it wouldn't tell me what the Gmail said). Swipe up again for a menu of widgets to access your various apps. The music player remote control, for example, lets you fast forward, rewind, or pause your phone's music player. There's an Endomondo widget for fitness buffs, showing data from the installed app running on your phone.
If you keep your phone in a bag, the watch becomes especially useful, since you can screen your calls and text messages using the watch before deciding whether to go digging for your phone. You can't actually answer calls with the SmartWatch, though. It isn't a headset, it doesn't have a mic, and it doesn't have a touch keyboard. The best you can do is ask it to make your phone beam a pre-programmed text message back to whomever is calling or texting you.
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Everything's configurable. You can hide or display various widgets, or tell the Facebook and Twitter widgets to only bother you if direct messages or mentions arrive. Intriguingly, there's an open SDK, so anyone can write a SmartWatch widget. They're starting to proliferate in the Android Market, although a bunch of the third-party ones are primarily in Japanese. This platform looks fairly easy to write for, and the possibilities are pretty endless.
Bluetooth Pains and Battery Life
My top gripe with the SmartWatch is the crankiness of Bluetooth disconnecting and reconnecting. I turn off my phone occasionally. Sometimes I'll turn Bluetooth off to save battery, and running Bluetooth all the time to support the SmartWatch knocked at least a few hours off my Sensation's standby time.Reconnecting the SmartWatch to my phone was always touch and go. Sometimes it would happen effortlessly. Sometimes it would take a while. Three separate times, I had to unpair the SmartWatch and re-pair it from scratch. The SmartWatch doesn't lose the time when it isn't connected to a phone, but it loses pretty much all of its other abilities.
There are newer Bluetooth technologies which could extend battery life and simplify pairing, but not many phones currently support them, so I suspect Sony decided to aim at a broader market.
During testing, I got four days of battery life, just as Sony promised, but new devices that support Bluetooth 4.0 can go for two weeks without a charge. The SmartWatch recharges using a proprietary USB cable that clips into it.
Conclusions
The SmartWatch is, for now, unique in the market as a stylish, consumer-centered tech watch. The MotoActv is bigger, more expensive, and bulkier, and very fitness-focused. The WIMM One watch, which also runs a full version of Android, is even more expensive at $300, and it's less fashionable and is targeted at developers. Texas Instruments warns that its $200 "Meta Watch" is not considered a consumer product. And there's a buzzy smart watch on Kickstarter called Pebble, but that product doesn't actually exist yet.Sony's watch is definitely aiming for consumers, but they'll have to be patient and tech-savvy consumers. All that Bluetooth disconnecting and reconnecting is a buzz kill, and the screen is dimmer than a five-dollar monochrome watch you buy on the street.
On the other hand, the SmartWatch solves a problem many people have: burying their phones so deep in their bags that it takes James Cameron to fish them out. The SmartWatch tells you who's calling or texting, so you can decide whether or not to go spelunking. But until Bluetooth is a little more bulletproof, prepare to have to fiddle more to keep it linked up. If you're a geek, or you love an Android-centric geek, the SmartWatch makes a great gift. I want to see people write their own widgets for this thing. That would be cool.
Final Thoughts
