Why trust Greenbot’s G tch may have a more simple industrial design than the Android ar watches from Samsung Motorola, but with a user experience so emphatically focused on the Android ar OS itself, fashion aesthetics may not matter quite so much.
Indeed, as we learned dnesday during the I/O keynote, Android ar is all about serving snippets of contextual information that respond to external signals like your schedule, your location, the weather, other data points you deem interesting. The system doesn’t boast a traditional home screen like you’d find on a phone or tablet. Instead, ’s new wearable OS serves notifications Now alerts on cards that take over the watch face.
image: Thanks to a built-in microphone, you can reply to Hangouts messaging with voice replies.
Information slips in. Information slips out. And everything you would otherwise see on your phone has been reformatted reconsidered for teeny-tiny watch displays. During my hs-on G tch demo, I could only play with the watch set to “retail mode.” Actual functions were turned off, but the experience demonstrated how Android ar can be used for voice-controlled text messaging, checking the weather, seeing one’s step counts.
Swiping through the home screen cards, I found everything about the UI to be fluid natural. Some of fonts erred a bit too small for my eyes, but in general have done a good job in surfacing the info that matters most.
Image: The Android ar UI was fast fluid on the demo unit I played with. But remember: It wasn’t actually running full Android ar apps.
At 63 grams, the G tch felt just as light on my wrist as my everyday analog watch, its overall dimensions didn’t overwhelm my anatomy. The G tch’s 1.65-inch, 280×280 I display promises always-on performance. The display is fairly bright, but not as brilliant as the saturated tones of the Super AMOD displays on Samsung devices.
As you can see from my photos, the G tch is just a simple slab of metal with slightly rounded-off edges. It comes in two colors—“black titan” “white gold”— says the case is forged from a single block of stainless steel.
image: The G watch is 10 mm thick. t it on, it basically feels like you’re wearing a normal wristwatch.
A 400 mAh battery is rated for 36 hours of use. That’s not great battery life, the G tch doesn’t directly accept a stard B cable for charging. Instead you lay the watch on a separate charging cradle. It’s an approach that limits you to proprietary charging hardware, but at least you don’t have to fiddle with a tiny insertion point every time you need to charge.
Image: ‘s demos an actual working G tch, showing off how voice comms work. Notice how he’s cheekily unbuttoned his cuff to show off the watch.
Other internal components include a 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 processor, 4GB of storage (for all your new Android ar apps), a 9-axis sensor that features an accelerometer, gyroscope compass.
confirmed that the step counts you see in the image at the top of this article orginate directly from the G tch itself—the wearable doesn’t need to pull them from a phone or, say, ’s feb Touch activity tracker.
The G tch will go on sale in the ay store today for $229, should ship to early buyers on ly 7. It may not be the most glamorous Android ar hardware announced today, but its design in inoffensive—, remember, Android ar is the star of this show.
