Smartwatch: Is it really a smart watch?

If I only had three wishes the 1^st one would be a decent smartwatch, the 2^ndone world peace and health to all mankind and the 3^rd one is more personal but you wouldn’t care (so please forget about it).

Right now though, world peace seems quite more probable than a really great smartwatch!.

Let me explain myself by providing a quick ancient history course first. The idea of a smartwatch has always been quite attractive to me. I have followed this particular market since 2005. 

My first one was the unforgettable Fossil Abacus (Fossil Abacus), which could very well be the ugliest watch ever. Uhmm scratch that, maybe the ugliest thing ever created/conceived by man. Period. Especially the brown strap was a monstrosity in itself. However there was a real Palm pda hidden in there, complete with an ingenious little stylus that showed real promise. The screen was an one incher (if I do remember correctly) grayscale and being actually able to operate this smartwatch required that:

1)      Your eyes were sharper than a hawk’s

2)      Your hand related motor skills were on par with that of a world renowned micro surgeon.

But still, it was a geek dream come true. And I think I even wore it twice. (No wonder I was looking for a girlfriend back then.) It wasn’t really useful though, mainly because of its small size, which was its unique selling point in the first place. Definition of dead end just provided. The notifications were hardly audible (thanks to the absolutely tiny speaker), provided you had superhero sensory abilities. Battery life was a little joke in itself. All in all, it may have been the true triumph of gadgetry over practicality and I even recall having installed an ebook reader and trying to read from it. Yes. I wanted to suffer.

So that was my first relationship with a smartwatch and I will never forget about it, but some years later (2009 I think) it was true love knocking at my door in the form of SonyEricsson MBW-150 (SE MBW-150).

This was a watch that you could actually wear and not be ashamed of interacting with grownups. Especially the music edition that I had purchased was looking really good, I might add. This was not a fully fledged PDA in itself, but rather an accessory of my smartphone. Thanks to a certain “smart mad” guy (Smartmadsoft) who provided drivers for almost every mobile OS, this proved to be a great buy. The battery life was acceptable at about 10 days and the tiny monochrome OLED screen was good. While it lasted that is. Because this watch had this particular bug. The OLED screen just dimmed to death by itself after some months, although lucky people with a fully working watch for more than one year have actually existed. All in all, it was a fairly priced actually useful gadget, again thanks to the community edition firmware that was developed. I will get back on this community thing later on. Don’t lose me here, it is important I think.

Next girlfriend, uhmmm smartwatch, was the Metawatch Strata (Metawatch Strata). This is where things started getting complex. Okay, I was quite an early adopter but this smartwatch showed some real promise for a long lasting relationship. But:

Initial FW was tragic in the ancient Greek way. I mean, really tragic. Random but extremely frequent disconnects from the phone rendered the watch completely useless. This was quickly resolved with a new FW though. The watch was quite good, battery life was maximized to maybe 14 days with the latest (current) FW, it was completely waterproof and actually worked. (This FW version also removed “the fish”! Dear God, who thought about this?) Vibration motor was a good thing, also. Why didn’t I keep it? Because I was unfortunate enough to have (and love) an iphone. On iOS your only way to connect to the watch is the official software (MWM – MetaWatch Manager) which is severely limited. If you jb the iphone some more functionality can be achieved but this is it.

But use the watch with an Android smartphone and the MWMCE (MetaWatch Manager Community Edition, that is) and a whole new world is revealed. Gone are all the problems/bugs of the MWM. All languages are presented, no more lag in CLI when receiving a call, even contact pictures appear (in glorious grayscale)! You can parametrize what you see on the watch to almost inhuman levels. You can even get rid of the absolutely frustrating four square screen layout. All in all, the Strata is light (though big and ugly), tough and provides proper battery life. But the screen is weird (lack of a better word here). It is advertised as a memory LCD display which means nothing  to me (and to most people I dare assume). The good: There is always one angle at which the screen is clearly visible no matter how bright the sun is. The bad: The angle is just one and most of the times it is not the angle at which you are used to looking at your watch. And now comes the ugly: The watch is severely handicapped when used with the official MWM, which is the only available option on an iPhone. My honest advise to Metawatch would be to try and utilize some of the community programmers of the Android scene and create smth close to MWMCE for iPhones (maybe only jailbroken ones, due to exclusive Apple imposed limitations). So the Strata seems that it was halfway there but just not actually there. This is why a friend with a Galaxy Note 2 is now using it.

Let here dully be noted that I would have bought a Pebble (Pebble) if there was one to buy, but come on people: Who wants to wait for six months in order to get one? Since it does nothing more than the Strata, to the best of my knowledge. Apart from the obvious hype, of course.  And okay it is infinitely more presentable / less embarrassing . One little comment here to Pebble’s PR people: Please do not confuse people into thinking they are getting an e-ink screen. Thank you.

Oh, the quest for true love never ends though… My current attempt/latest crush is the infamous i’m watch (i'm watch). Long story short, it’s Italian. While this statement should suffice for people who have bought Italian cars (not supercars that cost more than I will ever make until I am expected to die), let me explain for everyone else:

My current smartwatch a.k.a. i'm watch

It is sexy, as in truly good looking, although a bit on the heavy side. Okay that was an understatement, it is very heavy.  And the armband is too wide (40mm) and this can be annoying.  But let me recap, it is sexy. If your position in the corporate hierarchy is not in the upper tiers you might even want to be seen wearing this watch. This is a claim that has not been valid in my smartwatch relationships until the i’m watch arrived.

The screen is big, bright and OLED sexy. It also is curved, which makes it look even sleeker. As one sad, angry and confused reviewer (John Sciacca's opinion about i'm watch) has stated the company created so much fuss about the curved screen that would be appropriate if they had found the cure for cancer! Cannot say I disagree with him. However, I think this is something that has not been done before.  And it looks good. Italian design, you see.

Let’s continue with the good stuff. It has a color screen, 4 GBs of flash memory. It can play music, it has its own app market, you can even install other compatible (selecting from a real small list) apps via the sideload app which is available on the i’m market! It is a real standalone device that runs a custom Android 1.6 version that runs apps natively and is truly small. And good looking.

The bad stuff: The watch is slow, the scrolling is not perfect, memory is way too low, processor speed is just not enough.  A watch should be lightning fast, even more than a smartphone, since we are supposed to interact with a device that we are only used to just glance at. It is thick, it is heavy, it feels annoyingly big on the wrist.

The ugly stuff: For Christ’s sake this God damned thing has an inbuilt speaker, mic and 3,5 mm headphone jack! It supports phone calls through the watch via its terrible speakerphone/mic combination. Now, repeat after me: “I do not want to talk to my wrist. I am a grownup. I love Dick Tracy (and even Star Trek) but I still need to have friends and live a rather normal life”. This totally rules out walking on the street and talking to my wrist. Even if it worked properly (which is not the case), why would I want to do that? Moreover, it just does not work. The sound is terribly garbled and you simply cannot understand and be understood. The best (actually, worst) thing is that because of the speaker and mic and headphone hole, the watch is 100% not waterproof. Forget it on your wrist and walk/dance in the rain. Watch is dead. Forget it on your wrist and wash your hands. Watch is dead. Forget it on your wrist and sweat a lot. Watch is dead (which renders the imsport app completely useless for normal people who do sweat when they exercise). Battery life is a joke. A real bad one, indeed. With very moderate use, you might squeeze 20 hours out of it. Push it too hard and it will say bye-bye before you finish LOTR vol. one. Setting it up (provided that your phone supports tethering) is VERY complicated, even for a techhead with little to no life. Trust me.

The shameful stuff: If only i’m watch did not have a speaker/mic/headphone jack then it might have been 5 Atm waterproof, maybe thinner and lighter and hopefully with a bigger battery!!!

Bitter conclusion: Smartwatches up to this moment are either smart or watches. The i’m watch is really smart but not (at all) a watch, whereas the Casio GB-6900 (Casio BT watch) is 100% a watch (think about the 2 year battery life and 200m water resistance!) but not that smart, unfortunately. Still it is a candidate for my next tech affair.

Can Apple or Samsung or someone else manage to come up with a smartwatch that is both smart and also maintains the basic watch characteristics? Hopefully, yes. One real nice, yet ridiculously expensive device that I have used in the past and that could possibly lead to the right direction, is the LG GD910 watchphone (LG watchphone). This one was actually quite useful, could be used with a BT headset (unlike the i’m watch), was working great, it’s battery life was good, it had a very premium feel and was indeed beautiful. If I do remember correctly, the strap was a Tag Heuer design (made from carbon fibre)! And last but not least, it supported 3G video calls through it's tiny front facing camera. Gadget Heaven guaranteed.

So is there hope that a really decent smartwatch becomes a reality before humanity bores itself to death with Harlem Shake videos or an extinction level event (see here: huge meteorite impact/zombie apocalypse/some super-flu virus kills us all) takes place? Let us wait and see…

Until then, I think i have to keep searching for true smartwatch love.