I'll have to find that watchface (it's note quite perfect, but close - love the shortcut widgets).
I find the standalone works quite well on my Moto 360. Problem is I find the GPS too inaccurate. Music works great, if not incredibly tempermental to actually get on the watch. Biggest hitch is some apps insist on you being connected to the internet to work, but the phone can indeed be left at home.
I'm really excited about this. And I'll admit, for fitness I would like a little bigger face than the 360 has.
I also think NFC (along with maybe a fingerprint sensor for security) would be really terrific.
GPS inaccuracy is something that seems to plague most smartwatches as they've chosen less radio power to minimize the drain on the tiny batteries. My S was more accurate when new but took a huge hit to the battery when being used by itself . With the first firmware update I got last year the connect ability went way down but so did battery drain. An hour of bike riding with S Health mapping my ride used to use about half my battery vs about 20% now.
With the bigger onboard memory and AW2.0 having music on the watch itself ability will become more prevalent in the future and as Android used to need task killers to optimize efficiency I see AW efficiency gains helping in the regard quickly as well. Be it a phone or watch we're just not gonna get those whopping batteries we want but demand long battery life to go with multi tasking and developers are listening and acting.
What I tout over and over as standalone isn't always the phone in a different geographic location as much as the ability to do entire tasks without touching the phone at all, whether using 3g, Wi-Fi or the Bluetooth tether for data as needed. The widgets app I just reviewed is an example. I want to use Power Amp music player or Pandora on the phone but control it from the watch totally. It's much more battery friendly to do that vs using the watch's onboard music player. When checking to see the source of that thunder I just heard it's faster and easier, due to muscle memory, for me to tap the watch than open the phone and open a radar or weather app. Same with a quick note, even though I have quick notes ability on my phone. Make the note, or voice memo, on the watch, sync it to the phone as needed.
Back in the day we used to carry voice recorders, pda and music players. Then Android and iPhones made that obsolete. The future I'm excited about is that marriage of tasks we now enjoy on our phones will be even more convenient. The Neptune project carries things the opposite way, the watch being the workhorse and phone being basically a monitor, much like Splashtop app turned tablets and phones into monitors for our desktops and laptops until the Surface type of device pretty much killed that usage about the same time SP went all greedy and decided $10 a month , per device tethered to, would be their demand.
Only Apple and Google seem to have both the willingness and the cash to push things more in the direction of Neptune project.
As was discussed in another smartwatch thread, it'll be interesting to revisit these threads in a decade just to see where the technology went, be it forward or with the beta max and Bonephones ( a set of headphones that didn't go into the ear but sat on the neck and vibrations moved from the neck to bones in the ears to produce sound.
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