S7: the State of Google Wear OS

So, for the past week or so, I have been walking around with LG Watch Sport running the latest and greatest Wear OS version. For those who don’t know, that smartwatch is an LTE enbled device from February 2017, the first to leverage then new Qualcomm 2100, with plenty of memory and storage, and a brilliant 1.39" screen. It also has fairly similar to S7 weight and size.

This is my take on the latest wearable software from Google, for those who are mulling S7 purchase.

Needless to say, your S7 mileage will vary due to newer hardware and Suunto’s secret sauce. The review below is for Android connected Wear OS smartwatches. Your experience on iPhone will not be anywhere as good.

TLDR: Wear OS is a fairly capable smartwatch platform, especially when run off a beefy hardware spec and connected to an Android phone. While it is clearly inferior to Apple, it does shine in many places providing better and more elegant solutions. It is definitely better than competing offerings from Fitbit and Garmin in all respects but speed and battery life. And with less than two weeks before the big launch, how it performs on S7 premium hardware, we’ll know soon enough.

GREAT

Tiles: The new tiles showing summary information from various apps, like weather, or activity tracking, or custom timer presets and accessible via swipe from the main watch face is great! Apple Watch introduced similar deck of app cards back in the day and since then has been continuously shifting it around, but Wear OS tiles are simple and very accessible. My only wish is for more apps to support this functionality.
Integrated music controls: these used to be accessible via notification drawer where they would get in the way or be completely dismissed. Now the controls, should anything be playing, are always available from quick settings drawer, so you can get to them whenever.
Google Fit: Google snooping notwithstanding, the new Google Fit, especially on the watch itself, is really well done. The charts are nice and to the point, the app supports tiles and its own watch face, so for those of you who need activity tracking, Google solution is increasingly competitive with the likes of Garmin and Fitbit, both on the watch and on the phone
Swipe enabled keyboard: Typing letters on the tiny watch keyboard may seem to be crazy, but boy it works! And in multiple languages. Much faster than letter doodling on Apple Watch and a huge improvement over precanned replies available on Fitbit or Garmin. So, for those few cases when a standard reply doesn’t work, but what you have to say is relatively short, the keyboard works fantastic.

GOOD

Revised and streamlined UI/UX: Overall, the look-and-feel doesn’t change significantly. But improvements are everywhere. More settings are available via controls drawer, notifications are done better, there’s ability to quickly dismiss things, and so on.
Google Pay: Much better than Garmin or Fitbit in terms of card coverage. But you knew that!
Apps: Yes, you can install apps. Be it lists, music, task management, weather, social – you name it. This is by no means Apple Watch, but is definitely order of magnitude better than anything you’d see on other smartwatch platforms including Tizen-based stuff.
Google Keep: my personal favorite for keeping lists, from packing to groceries. Syncs up well with smartwatch and web and is very useful all around
Rich notifications: not only you get full emails or texts, as opposed to previews, but the apps can expose app-specific actions like snoozing or completing a task. This is one of the main reasons why one would pick up a smartwatch to begin with, and the notifications work real well on Wear OS, especially larger high resolution screens.
Customizable watch faces: Google wasn’t the first to come up with complications for their watch faces. But unlike Apple, they let you create your own watch faces, provide standard ways to customize them, and add complications from third party apps. So, my watch face from LG has a background art from Google and complications from the likes of Accuweather and Todoist
Google Assistant: not my cup of tea, but it’s there. One swipe away, all things Google, along with a daily joke. I kid you not.
Hardware buttons as shortcuts: Most Wear OS watches have 2-3 buttons, and most of these buttons can be programmed to launch apps
Device unlock: unlike Apple Watch that relies on a PIN to type in, Wear OS offers several other ways including pattern that are much faster. Also, as long as the watch remains on your hand and connected to your phone, the phone would unlock automatically, which is an Android shortcut for all Bluetooth devices. Nice!

NOT SO GOOD

Apps: Yeah, those… Unfortunately, the selection isn’t there when compared to Apple Watch. If you fancy listening to audiobooks and perhaps have an Audible subscription, you are out of luck. No Audible for ya! Like your weather from The Weather Channel? Too bad. No app either. And very often what is available, like AccuWeather, hasn’t been updated in years and is the same old tired version from the early dark days of Android Wear.
Offline music: There are plenty of player apps to be sure, but only Google Music supports anything resembling decent sync of your library and playlists.
Streaming services: Another ouch… You get half broken Pandora that supports offline streaming of cached stations. Trouble is, it’s somewhat flakey and it only downloads what seems to be 40-50 minutes. Enough for a short recovery run, woefully insufficient for a long run. Oh, and there’s iHeartRadio. Heard of that one? Given their $14.99/month whacky pricing, I doubt many would be interested. Sportify isn’t there. Amazon Music isn’t there. Deezer isn’t there. Apple Music? Ha-ha, a good one!

BAD

No sleep tracking: Wear OS continues a proud tradition of ignoring that part of your life. Maybe because every self respecting smartwatch needs to spend some quality time on a charger.
Gestures: tilt-to-wake didn’t work that well, it was more like tilt, tilt, and tilt again, wait, wait… Oh, here it is! The rest of them require you to twist your hands as if you were applying for a contortionist position at a freak show. Not terribly useful.

UGLY

Battery life: with always on screen off, tilt-tilt-to-wait off, LTE off, and notifications that I limit to close family and friends, severe weather alerts, and a few productivity apps, if I were to take the watch off the charger at 7:00 with 100% by 21:00 it would be around 30%. You throw in a workout (the watch does support that with built-in OHR), maps navigation, or a phone call via watch (non LTE), and you’ll be lucky to last a day.
Lag and slowness: Most watch interactions have been pretty slow, especially compared to Apple Watch. You press a button, and then nothing happens for several seconds with the screen going blank. Did it go back to sleep? No? Launching Google Pay is an exercise in frustration. You’d better be priming it well before you get to the counter at the store.
Google snooping: needless to say, everything you do on your watch stay between you, said watch, and El Goog. People were concerned about Google Fit and daily heart rate, but what about your emails, messages, contacts, calendar, and location? Music tastes perhaps?

If you are connecting Wear OS device to an iPhone:

Forget about making or receiving phone calls via smartwatch or listening to voicemail. This feature is not available courtesy of Apple respecting your privacy and its right to your bank account.
Forget about replying to SMS messages. This feature is not available. Same reason.
Forget about rich notifications with custom app actions, full text emails and messages, and the like – the extent of notifications will be limited by what is supported by iOS notifications and their text limits.
A quick check of Wear OS app in the App Store shows 2 star rating and connectivity complaints that stretch out for years. I really hope Suunto delivers a real improvement, but my experience of using Polar M600 with iPhone was fairly dismal, although not nearly as bad as what people tend to write about Kors and Fossil.

pilleus

Take a Fossil Gen 5 and your review will be different.

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

Good points.

I can comment on tilt to wake on the S7 is not bad at all. However, I would like to hear your opinion on this.

@pilleus What specifically? I think maybe there will be less lag. I certainly hope battery life is improved. But I don’t see what else would be different.

Gestures? Maybe.

Robert André Karlstad Gråwe

I think NickK is fairly on point with this.
But i would forgive all of this if the battery life was double what suunto states.
As it sits, you’ll have to recharge it every other day for the first 6 months, then you’re going to start to run out of juice because you recharged it every other day, and now the ball is rolling down a hill and suddenly you will want to send it in for a battery replacement.
That’s what is happening to my suunto 9 baro, that’s what happens to your smart phones aswell, you all complain to apple or whatever that the new updates are killing your devices, planned obsolence you call it, forgetting that you charged the device every day since it was new, and now it has 365 charge cycles on it and capacity has dropped 30% because that’s batteries for you.

A bigger battery will make this problem less problemy.
As i see it, a samsung galaxy watch is a better purchase if you want it to last, tho the suunto 7 obviously looks way better it will not be able to compete on batterylife, and the galaxy watch also has lte and working spotify.
The only downside is that it uses samsung health, wich isn’t half bad but it’s not suunto or garmin.

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

@Robert-André-Karlstad-Gråwe the 365 circles etc wont solve with a bigger battery.

Nor can one say that 365 ciclres will impact 30% the battery life

pilleus

Charging a smartphone or smartwatch once a day is reality for most users. And a big problem in all the countries with electricity only twice a week.

pilleus

My old Sony Smartwatch 3 and my old Misfit Vapor have both more than 1000 charging circles and no significant change in battery life. And during long activities with GPS I charged the devices on the fly with a power bank. Not comfortable but a solution.

And if Suunto 7 is able to record 7 or 8 hours with GPS without changing it is comfortable and twice the time of the old devices.

Fenr1r

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos said in S7: the State of Google Wear OS:

Nor can one say that 365 ciclres will impact 30% the battery life

Out of curiosity: what are the expected battery degradation stats for the S-series watches?

Robert André Karlstad Gråwe

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos
Really?
Look, i’ve worked with lithium batteries for 10 years now, it’s also part of my hobby and i’ve burned trough enough of them to know.
I have logs of my batteries on my charger that tells me what state they are in and how many charge cycles they have done.
Capacity goes down with charge cycles, and the more times you charge them the faster capacity drops.

The typical estimated life of a Lithium-Ion battery is about two to three years or 300 to 500 charge cycles, whichever occurs first. One charge cycle is a period of use from fully charged, to fully discharged, and fully recharged again.
Here’s a link to an article about lithium batteries and how to prolong it’s life, and i think you’ll find that capacity drops quite rapidly.
Hence a bigger battery will last longer as it needs less charge cycles.

https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

@Robert-André-Karlstad-Gråwe and do bigger batteries don’t suffer from this? (at least to this I replied).

Egika

@Robert-André-Karlstad-Gråwe
It largely depends on temperatures and the maximum and minimum voltages where charge and discharge switches off (if you use only the middle percentages of the battery they last way longer than with always fully depleting it, etc)
These effects are way bigger than just time or charge cycles for LiIon

cosme.costa

@Robert-André-Karlstad-Gråwe said in S7: the State of Google Wear OS:

I think NickK is fairly on point with this.
But i would forgive all of this if the battery life was double what suunto states.
As it sits, you’ll have to recharge it every other day for the first 6 months, then you’re going to start to run out of juice because you recharged it every other day, and now the ball is rolling down a hill and suddenly you will want to send it in for a battery replacement.
That’s what is happening to my suunto 9 baro, that’s what happens to your smart phones aswell, you all complain to apple or whatever that the new updates are killing your devices, planned obsolence you call it, forgetting that you charged the device every day since it was new, and now it has 365 charge cycles on it and capacity has dropped 30% because that’s batteries for you.

A bigger battery will make this problem less problemy.
As i see it, a samsung galaxy watch is a better purchase if you want it to last, tho the suunto 7 obviously looks way better it will not be able to compete on batterylife, and the galaxy watch also has lte and working spotify.
The only downside is that it uses samsung health, wich isn’t half bad but it’s not suunto or garmin.

My last phone, which I was charging everyday plugging it at evening and unplugging it in the morning for more than 2.5 years still has more or less the same initial capacity, I haven’t noticed any deterioration. My wife’s Nexus 5X still can last two days with the same initial conditions, more than 3 years ago, yes 3 years.

I think battery issues are quite controlled now a days.

isazi

@cosmecosta my Nexus5X lasted two or more days for a couple of years, but then the battery got worse and I was lucky if I could get a full day out of it. But, as always with these things, YMMV.

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

@isazi same here. But the N5X and N6P do have some issues with the battery and the bootloops.

Especially the 6P

Dimitrios Kanellopoulos

@isazi FYI I switched to oneplus 7

isazi

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos I switched to a Nokia 7 plus in the fall of 2018 and the battery is going strong. Used to have a oneplus 1 when they made their first product, but got a bit burned by the hardware bugs that plagued that release and haven’t had the courage to check other oneplus products after, although I am sure that after all these years they are much better now.

@Dimitrios-Kanellopoulos Great choice! Waiting for 1+ to arrive later in the week. You used to buy a sports watch. Now you buy a sports watch (well, a sporty smartwatch) and then you have to buy a phone to go with it