This looks great. Curious to see how consumers will react to third party smart watches. For the money would they rather buy an apple or google backed watch to ensure compatibility, updates, etc? Excited to see how this shakes out.
I've had my LG G for a few weeks now. I'm a heavy user, I wear it everyday and I'm quite smitten with it. Not the design per se. I mean the design is fine and it is nice enough that non-tech people who have no idea what AndroidWear is compliment me on it without seeing any of the touchscreen stuff. But I'd much rather be wearing one of these Vaporware Kairo Watches.
AndroidWear has some niceties like Google Now. When it works its a really amazing experience. On the other hand, I probably don't need to know the bus schedule near every place I go.
IMO, there are 2 things that make AndroidWear great and they are repeatable by other OS's.
1. My LG G is basically a notification manager and I love it. I never have to pull out my phone to check a notification and then realize 5 minutes later that I'm sucked into my phone checking twitter or something. A quick glance at my watch shows it was just an instagram like and I go on with my business. It takes a split second and makes a huge difference. Glanceable computing reduces the time spent staring at your mobile screen and increasing the time spent in the real world.
2. It disconnects and reconnects perfectly. If I reboot my phone, it automatically connects. If my phone dies, it reconnects as soon as it gets power. The bluetooth connection just works so perfectly, I never think of it.
I mention this second point because people report that the Pebble is OK at managing notifications but it disconnects frequently. I was told that if you turn off bluetooth on your iOS device and later turn it back on, its kind of annoying to repair with your watch.
TLDR: If this watch is good at pairing and notification management and actually ships this year, I would love to wear it.
@ccarella That is really interesting feedback. If the main use cases settle in to what you have experienced then I see third party OS's being a large opportunity. Thanks for the insight!
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It looks really good, I think. I really like watches, I can say that it is my small weakness. I have a real collection of this. And I can say that the watch looks the way that I would like it to be in my collection! But I think I will buy it later because I recently spent money on a unit for my collection. I bought from RСhrono rolex watches, and I can say that it is the most expensive watch in my collection. But soon I will buy this product too
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I love mechanical and automatic watches, and this looks really nice in terms of the watch design. It does start to lose me with the smartwatch features, at least as rendered. It's really hard to hit that pre-order button on first-gen tech when the category is still so wide open. That said, I'd love to see more watchmakers embrace Android Wear (or other smartwatch tech) and produce more devices that look like a watch (like Withings Activite) and not a computer strapped to your wrist.
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@samkairos Wow, definitely shooting for the stars with the features packed into these things. Really excited to see what you accomplish!
Carpool VC - S2E3, Prerna Gupta, Founder/CEO of Hooked
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Carpool VC - S2E3, Prerna Gupta, Founder/CEO of Hooked
Carpool VC - S2E3, Prerna Gupta, Founder/CEO of Hooked
Carpool VC - S2E3, Prerna Gupta, Founder/CEO of Hooked