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I got one of these to play around with from Amazon a few weeks ago, its megacheap (£16) now. My verdict?, it has a nice screen and looks pretty cool but is VERY tempermental and has some major design faults.
First off, I would recommend getting an app called liveview charm, this seems to solve most of the bluetooth disconnection problems, auto reconnecting when it goes out of range of the phone 99% of the time. The other main problem seems to be android killing the liveview app, thus disconnecting the watch, liveview charm tries to stop this, but doesnt always succeed, resulting in a manual reconnect being required.
Next, to solve the major hardware design fault of having to disconnect the thing from the watchstrap to charge it, modify a paperclip as per these instructions http://forum.xda-dev...d.php?t=1926897 to fashion a new strap pin. This is a biggie as its actually quite well held into the strap and quite difficult to remove with just your fingernails. It also feels like it could break easily if you do it wrong.
I found that the plugins were quite unstable, sometimes just completely failing to start for no obvious reason, and only working again after a reboot of the watch and reinstall of the plugin. Occasionally every single plugin would fail to start at the same time, meaning having to uninstall/reinstall the lot.
Of the plugins that worked, i quite liked the binary clock, ah watch, launcher (lets you launch any app from the watch, very useful), livewatches and the 2 camera plugins that let you control the phones camera shutter via the watch. Some of the gps apps showed promise as well.
The rss function works very well, as does the sms bit but i couldnt get any of the custom notification plugins to run, which is annoying as theres a k9 mail one that would be handy.
I like the vibration and strobing led function when a new message arrives.
The music controls work well, but it only lets you skip through and play/pause the current album, you cant select a different album from your library to listen to without using the phone to select it (at least i think you cant, im using the headset control emulation, the default music player controls just didnt work, probably due to the rom im using).
Find my phone is a bit pointless as bluetooth hasnt got much range and if its too far away it will have disconnected and wont work anyway.
The touch sensitive bezil works fine although the buttons on the top of the watch feel very flimsy.
Battery life is pretty good, i get a good 5-7 days out of mine depending on use.
There is also open liveview , an open source replacement for sonys software, and its looking promising already. This one lets the watch read any notifications android can display (you can white or blacklist which ones). I have it set up for gtalk, gmail and a few others.
It adds a phone battery level indicator and a text viewer to the standard media controls,sms and find my phone functionallity of the origional sony apk. the rss function is gone, but it can be replicated using any rss app that uses notifications. Its a bit `flickery` at times and i couldnt get it to forget notifications without clearing them from the app on the phone, but it seems to work well and is less flakey than using the sony plugins. There is no plugin functionality as yet, but it is promised in a future release.
Such a pity they didnt test and refine this little device a bit more, it has great potential but to be honest, its too unreliable to use as anything other than a watch as you dont know if its synced properly unless you check, and if it isnt you miss all the sms notifications etc that occured since it disconnected (it doesnt queue them for the next sync, it just forgets they ever happened).
EDIT: Since writing this little review, i have pretty much solved all the watches little foibles and apart from requiring a manual push of the sync button when it dissconnects it actually works quite well. I posted how i did it below.
First off, I would recommend getting an app called liveview charm, this seems to solve most of the bluetooth disconnection problems, auto reconnecting when it goes out of range of the phone 99% of the time. The other main problem seems to be android killing the liveview app, thus disconnecting the watch, liveview charm tries to stop this, but doesnt always succeed, resulting in a manual reconnect being required.
Next, to solve the major hardware design fault of having to disconnect the thing from the watchstrap to charge it, modify a paperclip as per these instructions http://forum.xda-dev...d.php?t=1926897 to fashion a new strap pin. This is a biggie as its actually quite well held into the strap and quite difficult to remove with just your fingernails. It also feels like it could break easily if you do it wrong.
I found that the plugins were quite unstable, sometimes just completely failing to start for no obvious reason, and only working again after a reboot of the watch and reinstall of the plugin. Occasionally every single plugin would fail to start at the same time, meaning having to uninstall/reinstall the lot.
Of the plugins that worked, i quite liked the binary clock, ah watch, launcher (lets you launch any app from the watch, very useful), livewatches and the 2 camera plugins that let you control the phones camera shutter via the watch. Some of the gps apps showed promise as well.
The rss function works very well, as does the sms bit but i couldnt get any of the custom notification plugins to run, which is annoying as theres a k9 mail one that would be handy.
I like the vibration and strobing led function when a new message arrives.
The music controls work well, but it only lets you skip through and play/pause the current album, you cant select a different album from your library to listen to without using the phone to select it (at least i think you cant, im using the headset control emulation, the default music player controls just didnt work, probably due to the rom im using).
Find my phone is a bit pointless as bluetooth hasnt got much range and if its too far away it will have disconnected and wont work anyway.
The touch sensitive bezil works fine although the buttons on the top of the watch feel very flimsy.
Battery life is pretty good, i get a good 5-7 days out of mine depending on use.
There is also open liveview , an open source replacement for sonys software, and its looking promising already. This one lets the watch read any notifications android can display (you can white or blacklist which ones). I have it set up for gtalk, gmail and a few others.
It adds a phone battery level indicator and a text viewer to the standard media controls,sms and find my phone functionallity of the origional sony apk. the rss function is gone, but it can be replicated using any rss app that uses notifications. Its a bit `flickery` at times and i couldnt get it to forget notifications without clearing them from the app on the phone, but it seems to work well and is less flakey than using the sony plugins. There is no plugin functionality as yet, but it is promised in a future release.
Such a pity they didnt test and refine this little device a bit more, it has great potential but to be honest, its too unreliable to use as anything other than a watch as you dont know if its synced properly unless you check, and if it isnt you miss all the sms notifications etc that occured since it disconnected (it doesnt queue them for the next sync, it just forgets they ever happened).
EDIT: Since writing this little review, i have pretty much solved all the watches little foibles and apart from requiring a manual push of the sync button when it dissconnects it actually works quite well. I posted how i did it below.
Edited by maniac_mouse, 08 March 2013 - 03:04 PM.
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