By Liyo Kikon
SMART watches have been around for years and I’ve wanted one for a long time too, but they used to cost a fortune and the technology did not settle to a point where it was actually useful. I remember when pebble initially started the craze with their highly successful Kickstarter campaign and a whole lot of people were drawn to smart watches when apple released their take on the watch but even that did not convince most people to go out and get one. It was a “cool luxury” to own a smart watch, but all that changed when android wear came out and Motorola released their round faced beautiful watch two years back.
There are many android wear smart watches out there by Asus, Samsung, LG and others but I’ll be talking about the one by Motorola, namely the Moto 360. So, what can you do with a smart watch? The answer is simple, you can check your phone’s notifications and interact with them from your wrist while your phone rests inside your pocket or bag. But that’s not all, I found that the most useful feature was to make use of Google Now and the very superior features of Google voice. If you’re an android user, you obviously use the “OK Google” feature to do just about everything from setting alarms to finding out facts about literally anything, and let me tell you that being able to do this from your wrist is extremely convenient when compared to a situation where you have to take out your phone every time you need to use it. And making quick replies to your WhatsApp messages directly from the watch with preset messages or using voice command is a breeze. There are health monitors such as step counters, heart beat sensors and others which makes it ideal for tracking your fitness status everyday, but enough about features since those can be found online, lets talk about actually using it in the real world and here’s the big question - how useful is it really? And the answer is simple - its actually more useful than you can imagine. Use it for a few days and you won’t be able to live without it.We all get a ton of notifications in our phones in the form of messages, email, app notification and each time your phone goes “ting!”, we all have the habit of grabbing it out of our pockets to see what’s trying to grab our attention. Now, imagine a scenario where you get a notification and you just look down at your wrist and interact with it directly from there! This obviously looks cool, but it can actually save you the trouble of fumbling through your pockets and turning on your phone just to see if the notification was worthy of the attention you gave it.
Today, you can get the first generation Moto 360 for around 12,000/- or less and the second generation will cost around 24,000/- but realistically speaking, the first generation is good enough for everyday use since ‘notifications’, ‘fitness tracker’ and ‘voice command’ are the main things you need in your wrist. The battery for the watch will easily last the entire day on light to moderate usage and at the end of the day, you can place it in the wireless charging dock which will turn the display into a beautiful clock for your desk. Speaking of the display, it has a 46mm circular display which is quite clear even in bright sunlight. The touch display feels very smooth and there are no lags and since it uses stock android, it looks beautiful too! About the software, it currently uses android wear 1.4 but android wear 2.0 is just around the corner and a developer preview is already available which looks very promising and it will obviously support all devices once it is released. It also packs a 4GB internal memory and 512MB Ram which is more than enough for everything you need on your wrist. And it is IP67 certified which means it is dust and water resistant.
Although Apple is trying hard to make the apple watch more appealing, until Siri becomes as powerful as Google Now, I will definitely recommend an android wear smartwatch to anyone looking to buy one, lets just hope that Apple comes out with a better device later this year.
