I am a geek. More specifically, I am something of a gadget geek and this really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone. I like to surround myself with all sorts of technology and that’s why the very idea of a smartwatch intrigued me so much. You mean I can send and receive text messages from my wrist? And I can read my e-mails there too?
For a few months there, I had seriously considered picking up a Pebble
smartwatch, but it felt somewhat limited in its functionality. I added the Sony SmartWatch SW2
to my Amazon wish list last month. At the time, I wasn’t completely sold on Sony’s second take on the smartwatch market, but imagine my surprise when Susanne decided to give me the SW2 as a gift for my birthday!
In many ways, the Sony SmartWatch 2 SW2 fits right in between the lower-cost Pebble and the higher-end Samsung Galaxy Gear. It seems to take a very middle of the road kind of approach, working with nearly all Android phones (4.0+), but it is not compatible with the iPhone. It doesn’t have the camera, microphone or speaker of the Gear, but it does have a small touchscreen display.
You can also load it up with a series of extension apps to get Twitter and Facebook notifications. There are even extension apps to remotely control the camera and music player on your phone, though based on my first couple of weeks with this device, those apps feel very finicky at best. The weather app seems to work, though, and I do like how I can send canned responses via SMS. It can be a little buggy, but just as smartphones took a few years to mature, I feel smartwatches are still in their relative infancy.
I will be writing up a full Sony SmartWatch 2 review and that will be published on MEGATechNews.com. In the meantime, just as I did with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 some time back, I’ve put together a quick unboxing video with an overview of this new gadget. Enjoy!
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