Pros
-Lots of apps available
-It does work
Cons
-Limited battery life
-Awkward to setup
Key Features: 1.6-inch display; Bluetooth and NFC; 200MHz
Qualcomm M3 CPU
Manufacturer: Sony
1. Design and Setup
Sony SmartWatch 2 - Design and Setup
What is the Sony SmartWatch 2?
The Sony SmartWatch 2 is among the latest wave of wearable
tech, arriving alongside the Samsung Galaxy Gear. It’s a Bluetooth-enabled
watch, and it costs around £150.
It’s a little more accessible than the Samsung Galaxy Gear,
being much cheaper and offering much wider phone support (most phones Android
4.0 or newer). However, it does show why the smartwatch is one of the most
maligned areas in tech. They claim to be devices of the future, but in-use too
many elements feel like retrograde steps into the past.
Sony SmartWatch 2 – Design and Setup
Conscious, perhaps, that smartwatches are at risk of being
dismissed as gimmicky toys, Sony has made the SmartWatch 2 feel very sturdy.
The front panel remains very gadgety-looking like the first-gen SmartWatch,
with a chunky square fascia, but the strap we got to test is a chain of black
metal links. It’s the sort of watch strap worm by men who like manly pursuits
and dream of owning sports cars.
The Sony SmartWatch 2 is also quite large and heavy. Not
only is everyone around you going to notice it on your wrist – you’re not going
to forget it’s there either. We also had some trouble altering the size of the
strap. It’s not a standard, easily-adjustable plastic strap, you need to
manually remove links with a tool.
However, you can buy other straps, including less chunky,
non-metal ones. And the look isn’t all bad. The SmartWatch 2 looks more
upmarket than the first Sony SmartWatch, and the bevelled silvery edge of the
watch face is a nice touch. Still, it has won few fans among our team.
The watch is rated to IP57 weather resistance, meaning it
can be submerged in water and is dust-proof. However, you’re not meant to take
the watch swimming.
The one potential fail point that could let water in is the
microUSB charge socket on the side, which is covered by rubber-sealed flap. Any
water resistance disappears along with its integrity, and as the watch needs to
be charged regularly, there’s a decent chance you’ll end up causing minor
damage to the seal after time.
Sony says the SmartWatch 2 battery lasts for up to four
days, but we found the battery stamina less than this. It generally lasts two
days once you’re tooled up with notification-producing apps. Sport watches like
the TomTom Multisport may die quickly if used for their main GPS-tracking role,
but use them as a watch and they’ll last for ages. In comparison, the
SmartWatch 2 is not the most reliable of watches.
Setup is also a little awkward.
The SmartWatch 2 has NFC for quick pairing, but as most
Androids out there still don’t have the feature we tested the watch with the
NFC-less Motorola Moto G. Pairing is easy enough – done so within the Bluetooth
monu of a phone, but the succession of extra software that has to be installed
following this is laborious.
You need to install two separate apps to even get your phone
to recognise the watch properly – Smart Connect and a special provisioning tool
for the SmartWatch 2. Even with these installed, the watch isn’t ready to do
much of anything. Almost no features are actually built into the SmartWatch 2
beyond the clock and torch (which is hilariously – but predictably - nothing
more than a white screen).
When not in use, a non-backlit clock face is shown (you can
pick between 10). This uses some power, but nowhere near as much as a fully lit
screen. It's not quite as clear as a 'normal' watch, though. Now, onto the
apps.
2. Apps and Verdict
Sony SmartWatch 2 - Apps and Verdict
Sony SmartWatch 2 – Feature and Apps
To get any other apps installed on the Sony SmartWatch 2 you
have to download extra modules from Google Play on your phone. These include
things like Gmail, Twitter, Calendar, a runner’s pedometer and music controller
app.
Sony’s Smart Connect app shows you the array of
‘recommended’ Sony ones, but there are other third-party ones available in
Google Play too. Sony’s SmartWatch has quietly become its own platform. Once
installed these mini apps become icons on the SmartWatch 2’s home screen, which
is a series of flick-able pages – each has six icons a piece.
However, it’s important to manage your expectations on what
these apps can do. The Sony SmartWatch 2 is a fairly ‘dumb’ middle man between you
and your phone. Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC are its only connections, and its
processor is slow. It uses a 200MHz Qualcomm M3 chip, far less powerful than
the 800MHz Exynos chip used in the Samsung Galaxy Gear.
The amount of processing the watch does by itself is tiny.
It can’t grab its own info over Wi-Fi either, and getting some of the apps to
actually work is a little painful. Each app has to be manually signed off by
you (on your phone) as being ‘allowed’ to be accessed by the watch. So things
like Gmail only work once you’ve jumped through a half-dozen hoops. There are a
few too many stages to make the SmartWatch 2 feel convenient or slick. And for
a device that’s meant to make things easier and quicker, that’s not really on.
We also found that some of the apps were pretty badly
judged. The Facebook app gives you far too many notifications, for example. You
get a buzz every time someone posts an update, not just when one relating to
you pops-up and the Gmail client can’t cope with any HTML formatting, and so
refuses to display half your emails.
But what is the Sony SmartWatch 2 actually like to use?
Aside from the power button on the watch’s side, there are
two main interface bits to the SmartWatch 2. There’s the little 1.6-inch
touchscreen and three tiny soft keys that mimic the back, Home and menu keys
you get with most Android phones.
After some early reports that the SmartWatch 2 is slow and
buggy, we found its performance to be reasonably good. The screen is quite
responsive, and there’s little of the lag we feared when we heard about quite
how low-powered its CPU is.
However, if you have a high-quality recent phone (which we
image most buyers of the SmartWatch 2 will have), using the watch does feel
like slumming it in comparison with your mobile. The screen looks much blockier
than a decent phone thanks to its low 220 x 176 pixel resolution, and not
enough apps behave intelligently enough. Where most popular phone apps have
undergone dozens of sequential updates that have tweaked what they are like to
use (often over years of development) the SmartWatch 2 shows that smart watch
apps have a long, long way to go.
At present, the Sony SmartWatch 2 does little more than the
drop-down notifications bar on your Android phone and it operates with even
less control. However, if you carefully limit what it tries to pull in, it is a
pretty handy way to check out your latest emails and text messages (as long as
the emails are not too complicated), and find out who's calling you without
taking out your phone.
The question – is that enough? We don't want to take calls
with a watch (this watch has no mic or speaker), or play games on one, but the
limited battery life and the awkward way it works stop this from being the step
up from a lone smartphone it should be.
Should I buy the Sony Smartwatch 2?
When compared to its most obvious competitor, the Samsung
Galaxy Gear, the Sony SmartWatch 2 does appear to adhere to the 'less is more'
maxim. It's cheaper, has fewer features and longer battery life.
However, it's not the perfect accompaniment to a smartphone
you're probably after. It's a pain to setup, and in trying to emulate a
smartphone interface to an extent, it highlights the ways it falls behind
modern phones in terms of the experience on offer.
The claim that a smartwatch is a solution to a problem that
doesn't exist is an old argument that we don't entirely agree with, but the
Sony SmartWatch 2 is not a great solution - assuming you find having to take
your phone out of your pocket a pain in the first place.
At present the Pebble smartwatch is a much better example
than this with much better battery life, though it still feels as if the best
is yet to come in the smartwatch arena.
Verdict
The Sony SmartWatch 2 is smartwatch that will give you most
of your notification on your wrist. It works. However, it's awkward to use at
times, fairly short battery life is an inconvenience and it's just not as slick
as most of the phones it can connect to.
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