LG G Watch: On Our Wrists @ Google I/O

At Google I/O, LG was finally ready to present and demonstrate its G Watch to the world. We’ve, met with the LG G Watch design team along with executives who flew in from Korea.

The G Watch is designed to be a practical smart watch. It is water and dust-proof (IP67), button-less, obey voice commands, and responds to simple motion gestures. It is easy to recharge thanks to a magnetic dock which makes it more palatable to use than the various connectors we’ve seen on the market thus far. Finally, it is always-on, which means that you don’t need to turn the display to see some information.

LG is coming relatively late to the game, but by biding their time and doing their homework, the company was able to deliver a product that benefited from the mistakes of others. The most important thing is battery life and ease of charge. The second most important thing is the ability to use standard watch bracelets from any manufacturer to make it your own."LG HAS DONE ITS HOMEWORK"

We’ve always said that the most challenging part of wearable technology is to get people to wear it, and LG seems to have made a priority to address key pain points before adding fancier features.

In our experience, most wearable devices aren’t being used simply because they are never charged when you want to wear them. With the dock, the odds of having a charged device increases. Granted, it is not as “ideal” as wireless charging and this is a proprietary dock, but it is still a step forward when compared to physically connect something. With its 400 mAh battery capacity, LG expects the watch to have a standby time of 36 hours  (that’s with the screen ON, in low-power mode)

The watch comes with an array of sensors, including a motion sensor which can be used for some fitness activities, but there is no heart rate sensor or other more sophisticated bio-sensors.

The G Watch is powered by a relatively powerful Snapdragon 400 processor that is also found in a number of full-size phones. LG uses a 1.65” display with a 280×280 resolution, which is sufficient to make thing clean and readable, but expect higher resolutions in the future. It will require an Android 4.3+ smartphone, but it should work with every brand, which is great.

The Android Wear voice-driven user interface looks very much like a smaller version of Google Now. It is clean and provides the same type of notifications that you can see on Google Now today. The metric for success is how often it will save you from pulling your phone out of your pocket / purse. We will use it in real-world conditions to see how good the idea really is, but for now, this sounds very interesting. What do you think? What should we try during our review?

Processor	Qualcomm Snapdragon 400
Display	1.65-inch LCD IPS, 280×280 pixels
Memory	512MB RAM
Storage	4GB
Battery	400mAh
Operating System	Android Wear (requires Android 4.3+ smartphone)
Size	37.9 x 46.5 x 9.95mm
Weight	63g
Connectivity	Bluetooth 4.0
Sensors	9-Axis (Gyro, Accelerometer, Compass)
Color	White, Black + custom bracelets
Others	IP64 Dust and Water Resistant

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: google i/io, google i/o 2014, LG, smart watch, Wearable Tech