Gav's World : News : January 2020

2020-01-10 : PowerWatch 2 (Luxe)

Woo hoo! Exactly a year and a day after backing the Matrix Power Watch 2 on Indiegogo it finally arrived. Initial impressions are that it's far from being a smart watch like my Pebble Time Steel is, but hopefully with several itterations of phone and watch software updates it'll get somewhere close.

Of course, the main reasons for backing this are the use of thermoelectric power to charge the watch (plus solar) and its built in GPS and heart rate monitor.

Impressions from the first few hours of use:

Paired to phone and upgraded the embedded software with no issues, although had to re-pair afterwards.
The up and down buttons will take a bit of getting used to as they're on the other side of the watch from my Pebble Time Steel!
Step counter (as others have noted) is a bit pish to say the least.
I definitely prefer the way that the Pebble does notifications - even the 10 seconds or so of displaying on screen as soon as they arrive.
When this watch can give me weather / sunrise / sunset information (amongst other things), it will be getting on a par with Pebble... apps that I currently have on my Pebble Time Steel (for example, just to give an idea of what a smart watch should be capable of):
- Several watchfaces, but I mainly use LCARS
- Weather
- Music control
- Send Text
- Alarms
- Stopwatch & Countdown timer Timer+
- Compass
- Nav Me
- Swim.com
- Trip Advisor
- pblCamera
- Astronomy App
Yes, I'm comparing it to Pebble: both were/are start-ups. Both have multiple crowd-funded products - both watches that I have are 2nd time around crowd-funded products. However, the Pebble OS / phone app / infrastructure / features were far more advanced than the PW2 appears to be - possibly because they had an SDK and app / watchface store at the first generation.
Lastly... now I may not have the biggest of wrists, but this was the first time I've ever had to remove all links and put the strap as far into the clasp as it goes - what sort of wrist is this strap designed for?!?!

2020-01-04 : Website Template Updated : v2.22.0

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