September 2014 at IFA 2014 LG unveiled the world’s first complete round watch, LG G Watch R.
Since Motorola’s beautiful round watch Moto 360, round
watches are the trend for smart watch. As an original Android wear partner LG’s
first smart watch G watch was announced at Google I/O this year. But the LG G
watch was as simply square display watch running Android wear. It had no big
feature than one the fist smart watch to run Android wear like other competitors
like Samsung at the point. LG has returned to smart watch business with it new
LG G Watch R. R for round, yes it’s a round watch. Unlike Moto 360, LG G watch
R has a perfect round display.
Design
LG have worked well on the design on the new LG smart watch.
It has a black round brushed metal finish with black rough plastic back. The watch
has a larger bezel than the small Moto 360 bezel but the bezel gives it a premium
look. Most mart watches until now, comes with a good look but does it good
enough to wear on your wrist. The Moto 360 looks great but it doesn’t look like
a watch or maybe it’s a watch from future. We expect smart watches like a regular
watch, that’s what LG delivered to us. The watch is also dust and water
resistant.
It has a crown on the
right side like the Apple Watch but with different functionality. The crown is
the home button of the watch which can be used to sleep/wake the device and
long press to access your settings like in more of the smart watch power by Android
wear. The swart comes with a black leather strap in standard size, which means
you can swap it with any strap you like. The watch also have a heart rate
monitor at the back, which make the first LG smart watch with it.
Unfortunately it doesn’t have GPS built in it. LG gives a
reason that the Android wear wasn’t supporting GPS at the moment of the R watch
design, but the Sony Smart watch 3 announced parallelly has a GPS chip built in.
Unlike Moto 360 it doesn’t have ambient light sensor too for automatic brightness
adjustment.
Display
LG G watch R has a 1.3 inch round display with 320x320 resolution bounded by those
big bezel. This bezel has hour minute markings over it; give an impression of
an exact watch we use. Moto 360 has a slighter bigger display 1.56 inches but
the display seems to be sharper and clear in LG watch. The display is a plastic
based OLED with draw very less power than the Moto 360’s IPS display. The G
watch R only consumes 10% of the battery at standby mode, giving it more standby
time than other smart phones.
Chip
Unlike Moto 360 with 4 year old Texas Instrument’s 800 MHz
single core processor, LG G watch runs an all new Quad Core Qualcomm Snapdragon
400 processor clocked at 1.2 GHz with a 512 MB RAM. The watch also have a 4GB eMMC onboard storage with a usable size of 3GB. You can store music in the storage space
and listen it through a Bluetooth headset, thanks to the latest Android wear
update. This update let us to store music in the device and listen it with
Google Music Wear version.
OS
As usual the swatch runs Android wear from Google. Android Wear
is in the initial stage but as Google push new update the experience is to get
better. The interface seems to work fine but the speech recognizing is slower
and buggy. The device wait for few more second than usual after the hot word “Ok
Google” to change to listening mode. Sometime it doesn't even listen to you. You
can dictate a mail to your watch and it can send it your destination right from
your wrist. Sometimes the dictation goes wrong and you have no way to edit it after
that and even the watch sent unfinished mails without any confirmation. All
these issues can be fixed with an update easily.
The watchfaces is perfectly designed to match the watch
design. Most of them are dark but classy. There are few faces than show more
details than just the time in it, like time from another time zone with a small
clock inside the main. Sport oriented faces shows even attitude you are right
now.
Battery
The LG watch have a 410mAh battery, better than all the
smart watch competitors. LG promises that it could power the device for two days.
In practice it may not be the case, it’s reported that it may get 2 days battery
backup for mild usage and about a full day for heavy usage. The watch doesn't support wireless charging
like Moto 360 or have a USB mini port to plug in like the Sony Smart watch 3.
LG watch has a charging candle for charging, which should be carried along with
your watch wherever you go. LG devoted the space gain from avoiding the
wireless charging or USB mini to make it as slimmer as possible.
LG has delivered the best smart watch so far with sleek design,
stunning display, better performance and longer battery.
[UPDATE]
| OS | Android Wear |
| Display | 1.3” Full Circle P-OLED |
| Dimensions | 46.4 x 53.6 x 9.7 mm |
| Weight | 62 g |
| Battery | 410 mAh |
| Processor | CPU Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 400, 1.2GHz |
| Bluetooth | 4.0 |
| Total Internal Memory | 4GB eMMC (user available memory up to 3 GB) 512MB RAM |
| Sensors | 9-Axis (Gyro, Accelerometer, Compass) PPG (Heart rate monitor) Barometer |
| Dust & Water Resistance | IP67 |
| Strap | Changeable |
[UPDATE]
European price EUR 299.99
US price $394.65 click here to buy from Amazon
Expected price in India Rs 24,000
[UPDATE] LG G watch R is now available at Google Play store check out