Great review David. It should be noted that the experience with Android phones is very good. If I had an iPhone, I probably would have had second thoughts about getting it.
Finally, as you noted, my initial impressions were also about its imperceptible heft, and of course the LCD display.
Mine is very, very comfortable. Maybe your clasp is defective?
Ok @HarryG I did a bit of testing on this. Here's what I found:
- The Bluetooth devices indicator on the Connected Watch SETTINGS can get out-of-sync.
Mine showed "Disconnected", even though the connection was restored after coming back in range.
Seems like this is a minor bug in the OS. The important thing is that the Bluetooth connection does recover on its own, about a minute after the phone and the watch are back in range. Maybe this is what you are seeing?
- WiFi observations:
When I walked away from the phone, the switch to use WiFi was not instantaneous. I used the watch settings to choose the WiFi network and about a minute later the "cloud" operations (like voice searches) started working; slower that over Bluetooth, but they did work. Walking out of the Bluetooth range subsequent times, did switch to the WiFi connection, but again, the thing to remember is that it does take about a minute to take effect.
- Finally WiFi integration seems to have dependencies on Android phones. From the manual it's not clear to me WiFi connection is still possible with iPhones. Maybe someone with an iPhone can chime in on this.
I run mine with the "Always on screen" set to 'ON' as well.
From my testing, these are my observations (had to do a couple of edits regarding "preferred" protocols):
- The crossed-out cloud icon appears when the connection to the phone is lost. This can happen when they go out of range, for instance when the phone is shutdown, set to "Airplane mode", or when the WiFi is lost.
- To be on WiFi, the watch's WiFi setting needs to be set to "Automatic" and configured to use a local HotSpot.
- If the phone is unreachable, the watch will show the crossed-out cloud icon and will not be able to do most of its operations.
- When phone became "unreachable" (I set it to Airplane mode), my watch was still able to run a couple of services via WiFi: Google Translate & partially Maps (pinpoint locations and Navigation require a connection to the phone). As for the rest of the services: Contacts, Google (Voice Commands/Search), Hangouts, and most 3rd party apps threw a "sad cloud" or an error message stating that the watch was "not connected/disconnected".
- If both Bluetooth & WiFi are available, the "preferred" method seems to be Bluetooth. I discovered while testing how they react when they go in-&-out of range due to proximity. This makes sense, because Bluetooth communications tend to consume less battery.
- If I the watch and the phone were connected via Bluetooth and suddenly they go out-of-range, the watch will try to reestablish connection back to the phone using WiFi. The re-connection is not instantaneous, because the watch is likely doing some "retries", before the other protocol is used. When they come back in range, the switch to Bluetooth should happen automatically a few seconds later. I say should because Bluetooth connections can be a bit inconsistent. Yesterday my phone's Bluetooth connections were flawless, but today they were not syncing automatically. I had to re-enable Bluetooth on my phone to re-sync with my car and the same happened with the watch.
Hope this helps.
I run mine with the "Always on screen" set to 'ON' as well.
From my testing, these are my observations (had to do a couple of edits regarding "preferred" protocols):
- The crossed-out cloud icon appears when the connection to the phone is lost. This can happen when they go out of range, for instance when the phone is shutdown, set to "Airplane mode", or when the WiFi is lost.
- To be on WiFi, the watch's WiFi setting needs to be set to "Automatic" and configured to use a local HotSpot.
- If the phone is unreachable, the watch will show the crossed-out cloud icon and will not be able to do most of its operations.
- When phone became "unreachable" (I set it to Airplane mode), my watch was still able to run a couple of services via WiFi: Google Translate & partially Maps (pinpoint locations and Navigation require a connection to the phone). As for the rest of the services: Contacts, Google (Voice Commands/Search), Hangouts, and most 3rd party apps threw a "sad cloud" or an error message stating that the watch was "not connected/disconnected".
- If both Bluetooth & WiFi are available, the "preferred" method seems to be Bluetooth. I discovered while testing how they react when they go in-&-out of range due to proximity. This makes sense, because Bluetooth communications tend to consume less battery.
- If I the watch and the phone were connected via Bluetooth and suddenly they go out-of-range, the watch will try to reestablish connection back to the phone using WiFi. The re-connection is not instantaneous, because the watch is likely doing some "retries", before the other protocol is used. When they come back in range, the switch to Bluetooth should happen automatically a few seconds later. I say should because Bluetooth connections can be a bit inconsistent. Yesterday my phone's Bluetooth connections were flawless, but today they were not syncing automatically. I had to re-enable Bluetooth on my phone to re-sync with my car and the same happened with the watch.
Hope this helps.
H HarryGWhen I am out of range, the connection is lost, the cloud icon is on.
When I am near the phone,nothing happens .I can wait for minutes, it does not reconnect.
H HarryGBut the cloud icon disappears , connection only reestablishes, when I unlock my phone and touch the app icon on the screen.
