(This five-day review of the Smartwatch 3 was actually meant to be a series of tweets, but splitting it into 140 character parts was so tedious that I realised it would be easier to make a brief blog post.)


Transflective LCD, yay.

Coming from an original Moto 360, I love that it can go anywhere (IP68) and is easy to clean, loves sunlight (transflective LCD) and that it lasts for two days with normal use. Performance is markedly smoother than the original Moto 360, and I feel interacting with Wear works better on a square screen. The SW3 is comfy to wear, and I like the understated design. GPS tracking with Strava and just the watch works really well. Paid $180 for it and am quite happy. Here's hoping it gets Wear 2.0 - and that Sony makes a truly standalone SW4 with LTE.

As for the whole "does anyone really need a smartwatch yada yada" - I find myself missing it when I for some reason forget to put it on. It's useful to have when biking or in other scenarios when the phone is inconvenient, for instance when carrying stuff (say a kid). It's more comfy to have just a watch as compared to a phone strapped to your arm when running. And I think I use my phone less when I can scratch the notification checking itch using just the watch.

Aaaaand this Fall LTE will become mainstream on smartwatches, and going through most of the day with just a watch and no phone will become a real possibility. I'm actually quite looking forward to that - I find my phone a huge distraction in a lot of scenarios.

Additional note, 18.06.2016: Turns out that if the strap is tight around my wrist, I lose the GPS signal. Some googling indicates that this is probably a widespread issue. The GPS antenna is more or less part of the wristband, and doesn't work properly if it gets sweaty (!). Works fine for me if I wear the watch a bit loose, also apparently using a sweatband between watch and wrist fixes it.