LG’s G Watch is more than a gimmick

I WAS cynical when I donned LG’s G Watch on my wrist for this review.

I WAS cynical when I donned LG’s G Watch on my wrist for this review. “A gimmick,” I thought. “It won’t add value to my day and it’s a hassle recharging a smartwatch daily — I don’t do that with a wristwatch.”

I can report that the G Watch is actually quite useful, although far from perfect. Your first question might be what does a G Watch do, apart from tell the time. Basically, it displays, as a series of cards, the notifications you see when you swipe down the notifications screen from the top of a connected Android phone.

Imagine this information appearing on little white cards that scroll upward on the watch. You then have the basic idea. You get cards when you receive emails, when someone sends you a text, for Facebook and Twitter notifications if you activate them on your phone, and for alerts. If this is overwhelming, you can turn off notifications for particular application in settings>general>apps.

If you want to enjoy this watch, you need to be across Google Now on your phone, as its cards also ­appear on the watch. You’ll get estimates of the time to go to work or back home, stock results, and sports results from your favourite team (it has NRL but not AFL). Google Now too can be configured but it’s a little sparse in its local offerings. It needs to be beefed up for Australian users.

LG’s G Watch uses Bluetooth 4.0 to connect to a mobile phone using the Android Wear app on the handset. The watch pairs not only with LG phones but with other smartphone using Android 4.3 (Jelly Bean) and beyond.

For me, the connection failed a couple of times, but I rectified things by disabling and re-­enabling Bluetooth on the phone. Thankfully, this happened only three times over two days.

When you get a call, the watch gently vibrates on your wrist and you can choose to take or reject the call. The vibration means you won’t miss the call. Invariably I’m not quick enough getting my handset out of my pocket, or finding it on a desk at home or work. So this is useful. But you can’t take the call from your wrist and there’s no speaker to hear the conversation. You still get your phone out for that.

The G Watch uses Google’s new Android Wear operating system, and we’re going to see a lot of it on wearables. LG says it hasn’t sought to modify it, so it’s supposedly a pure Google experience.

One of the big improvements with Android is voice recognition and that is a big plus on this watch. Using my voice, I could set alarms, send text messages, emails and reminders, ask how many steps I’ve walked (yes, it’s a pedometer), get it to show today’s calendar, and ask for directions with phrases such as “navigate to home” or “navigate to Central Station in Sydney).

You can also perform general web searches. For many cards, swiping right to left will display an option to show the full search results or emails on the phone. This worked brilliantly, especially for maps, which would show the broader map to complement where the watch was directing you.

Sometimes dictation of an SMS ended abruptly before I had finished the message, and the watch would send the truncated text. So I wouldn’t use it for messaging at a UN Security Council meeting, for example. Also, it repeatedly got the name of a colleague of mine wrong and I couldn’t SMS her.

LG has got right the issue of seeing the time without poking the watch, as we do with a wristwatch. The watch shows the time dimly, but when you move your arm to look at the time, the display lights up. This worked OK for me.

There are a few issues with the G Watch. Its 1.65-inch IPS display is hard to read outdoors. I managed OK when it wasn’t direct sunlight, but at the beach, you wouldn’t know the time. And I didn’t get the two days’ advertised battery life. On my first day, I didn’t get past 7pm, but I was tinkering with it intensively then.

With this watch, there’s no camera so you can’t snap pictures. There’s no audio out too, but you can separately install a Bluetooth headset with the same connecting phone.

Rating: 8/10

Price: $259 outright