When I purchased the watch, the variants with the steel-bands were unavailable in India and hence I opted for the grey/silvery steel watch case with the grey leather band. The watch makes heads turn every time I wear it. The watch screen does have a’flat tire’ design. which may not be aesthetically appealing to some. but I kind of liked it. It makes the watch stand out.
In the box you get a warranty card, a quick start guide, a Qi wireless charging dock(Yes, ’wireless’) and the watch itself.
I first had to install the Android Wear app onto my phone(available for free on the Google Play Store). The app helps to pair your watch with your phone and is practically a requirement before you can start using the watch with the phone. You can also change many of the settings of the watch from the app itself, though using the watch for the same is a tad bit quicker.
As the watch is paired with my phone, I can start as well as answer calls from it, though I still need to whip out my phone every time as the watch isn’t equipped with a speaker and hence you can’t exactly use it as a phone. I get to see the phone’s notifications onto my watch which, albeit helpful, can be a bit annoying when you are using the phone. The watch vibrates to notify you about stuff. I downloaded the Class Time app from the Play Store, which syncs well with the watch and gives me notification about the time remaining in the current class, the time of the next class and the location where it is to be held, right on my wrist.
I have used just two watch faces till now, though some of them are already pre-installed on the watch and plethora of them are available on the Play Store.
The watch is equipped with a optical heart rate sensor, which as the name suggests, measures your heart rate at intervals. The watch also has a pedometer on board, which measures the number of steps taken daily. This, I feel, is pretty useful as it eludes the need of another activity tracker dangling on your wrist although I am not sure how the leather band would fare with sweat.
You can either tap on the screen, use the button present on the side, or activate wrist gestures to turn the screen on. Or you could also switch on the ambient screen mode so that the screen remains in a low power mode. The ambient screen mode eats up the battery like someone who hasn’t eaten for days(or like a college student at a friend’s party.:p).
I read plethora of reviews before buying the watch and the one drawback that many people had complained about was the poor battery life. I have used the watch for a couple of days now and feel the battery life isn’t something that would worry me too much. After a day’s usage, I still had 24% of battery remaining, which I felt was pretty good, though I had turned ambient mode and wrist gestures off. The watch has been designed to last a full day and to be charged at night on the dock. So, getting past atleast one day seems pretty good to me. I am yet to try out the ambient mode but I don’t think the watch will survive through the day.