Call It, Maybe

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

It’s 3 in the morning and my daughter is crying in her crib. I pick her up, and rock her back to sleep. But when I lean over to place her back in the crib, the screen on my watch lights up, waking her once more. This is an unintended consequence of my watch’s ability to sense my movements, and it has come alive in anticipation that I may want something from it. But what I really want is to go back to bed.

The watch on my wrist, Samsung Gear Live, is one of two Android Wear watches already on sale. The other, the LG G Watch, is reviewed here. A third, the Motorola 360, is coming soon.

For years now, smart watches like these have been “coming soon.” Well, here they are. And it’s worth thinking about what they do, and how well they do it.

The main thing I’ve found that Android Wear smart watches do well—much like Android itself—is eliminate clutter. Thanks to recent updates to Google’s mobile OS, the barrage of emails and tweets that flood onto your phone during the day can be more easily dismissed and trashed and shunted aside by tapping or swiping on the notifications as they appear on the phone’s screen. And now, you can tap or swipe on those notifications from the watch face too. It is a wonderfully efficient way of managing digital clutter.

But overall, it feels like an evolution—as opposed to the revolution of the first iPhone and Android devices. It is not something entirely new, at least not yet. It is simply a way of shifting certain actions from one screen to another. It promises to do some things uniquely, but ultimately it is a triage system for your notifications. An alert system.

Driving in my car, my watch vibrates on my wrist. A new text message from my father has arrived. This is the Ur use case for wearables—acting on items without diving deep into a smartphone application. But there’s a problem. While my watch will listen to me, it doesn’t ever speak. There is no speaker, nor can I even command it to “read me my text” to have the message play on my phone’s speaker. So I still have to fiddle with a screen to read the message. Given the screen’s small size, it occurs to me that this is even more dangerous than looking at it on my phone. Replying, however, is effortless. I talk, and it sends him a perfectly transcribed response. A miracle, if a minor one.

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

That dissonance between utility and uselessness is the core experience. Some of the things that Android Wear, and specifically the Gear Live can do are really great. I’ve already sent very many text messages and emails from my wrist, without pausing what it was I was doing. It is especially true of very short messages, which it fields with aplomb. If you need to send something longer, you are still going to want your phone or even your computer. But voice actions for SMS—a short-format medium by nature—are great.

I’m hopeful Facebook and Twitter will roll out versions of their apps that support Android Wear voice actions, but neither company has shown much enthusiasm for the platform yet. Hopefully that will change, because the ability to run a voice command and update your status without having to take out your phone and unlock it is really hot.

“OK Google,” I say to my wrist, “play William Onyeabor.” On my phone, Google Play All Access Music Jukebox, or whatever it’s called this week, fires up and begins streaming “Atomic Bomb.” My phone is in my pocket, headphone cables snake up to my ears. It’s awesome. So what if the other people on the bus are looking at me. Who cares. I close my eyes and listen. I’m going to explode.

One of the bigger drawbacks of the Gear Live is that it’s a total battery hog. I’ve never gotten more than 24 hours out of it. One way to handle this is by charging it every night when you go to sleep. Yet one of the chief things I like about wearing a timepiece is being able to look at it when I wake up in the night, which you can’t do when it’s docked somewhere charging. Nor do I always remember to take it off at night (see above) which means I wake up with it dead on occasion.

Worse, the charging cradle is garbage. It’s difficult to click the watch in and out of it. Despite doing it every day, it never gets easier. It’s also a cheap little piece of plastic, that’s poorly designed so that it doesn’t sit well on a desk. It is remarkable to me that a product manager somewhere thought it was acceptable to ship a $200 watch, a miracle of glass and silicon and lithium-ion, with this horrible little plastic nub that looks like something you accidentally broke off of your LEGO Mindstorm kit.

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

I have trouble seeing my watch in bright sunlight, and just about can’t see it at all when I’m wearing my sunglasses—that’s a much bigger deal on a watch than a smartphone. Conversely, it can be much too bright in a dark room. You can place your hand over the screen to dim it, and you can also mute it which will keep the screen from coming alive when you raise your wrist. But forget to mute it, or tap it accidentally, and it’s going to annoy you at the movies, or in a dark room where your child is trying to sleep.

On Sunday, as I’m out and about, my watch buzzes to tell me I’ve taken 10,000 steps. Hooray! I’ve met my goal. I take another two thousand more before the day is through. Monday is a work day and I spend it sitting down and only make it 6,975 steps. My watch doesn’t notice. It bothers me about all sorts of things. It has a fitness app. Why not make it useful by prompting me to be more active?

The vibrations this thing puts off take some getting used to. For the first few days I wore it, every time someone called me, which would set off a series of hard vibrations on my wrist, it scared the shit out of me. Even once I became accustomed to it to the point where it no longer startled, I still found it very annoying.

At the end of the day, when I’m really really exhausted, I raise my wrist and mutter, “OK google, call a car.” Lyft fires. It knows just where I am. Within (literally) seconds, a car is on its way to me. Well, that was easy. Maybe too easy? At my desk, I am showing how easy it is to call a car, and accidentally ordered one. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to cancel as well.

Once, I had to take a minute and reboot my watch. No big deal at all, but an odd experience.

A notification flashes on my wrist. It’s from Google+. It tells me that 11 photos are ready to share. There is a small preview of one. It’s a picture I took of my family, my wife and children, all asleep. It’s really beautiful. I swipe to the left to see the others, but there’s only an option to share. I swipe back to the right to go back to that original image. I swipe up. Nothing happens. I swipe down. Nothing happens. I wonder about the other ten photos. I wonder who I would share a bunch of pictures I’ve never seen with. Why Google+, why? Some of the actions that developers are taking with Android Wear—even Google—are puzzling or poorly thought out.

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

The clasp on this thing is really nice. You can replace the band, but there’s no real reason to do so. And generally speaking, the hardware is nice-not-wonderful. It is noticeably big, but not ridiculous by any stretch. It is too dim, and yet still can’t get great battery life. It doesn’t have a front side camera or a speaker, which would make it a Dick Tracy device suitable for Hangouts and Skype calls. It seems such a waste for this to only be about text, and to only be able to input audio, rather than play it as well.

Overall this is a success. Do you love gadgets? Get it. You’ll enjoy playing with it and as more apps come along it’s just going to get more useful. But it isn’t for everyone. It lacks the gee-whiz factor of Google Glass, while offering no more utility (although you probably won’t get laughed at for wearing it). It needs a better reason to exist, which it doesn’t have yet.