Month: June 2014

LG G Watch first look

At the Google I/O conference this week they handed out Android Wear watches to attendees; I got the LG G Watch and have been gleefully wearing it for about a day.

The good:

  • There’s no annoying branding on the watch face, and no side buttons to get caught on things.
  • Actual pairing is pretty straightforward using the Android Wear app (once you get it installed…)
  • Showing notifications from my paired Android phone “just works”: texts, Facebook replies, “time for next meeting” pings, etc. It’s also easy to configure it to disable buzzing/pinging on the phone when the watch is active.
  • If you are brave enough to turn on Gmail notifications, you can easily archive a mail from your watch and never have to read it! Or you can swipe away the notification and read it later, if it’s like IMPORTANT or something.
  • Gestures for control are relatively simple.
  • The usual suspects in voice recognition like setting reminders and alarms work, as with Google Now or Glass.
  • If a voice command doesn’t match anything, it does a Google search. Some specific kinds of queries will give results from their knowledge graph, but you can easily end up with generic search results … which inevitably include Wikipedia. :D If you want to actually read a page, it doesn’t try to force it onto the tiny watch screen — it opens up the browser on your phone.
  • The always-on dim display mode looks pretty good indoors or in the shade.

The bad:

  • The screen is nearly illegible in direct sunlight, even pumped up to the max brightness.
  • The G Watch does feel a bit clunky — it’s just kinda big for a watch. But really, it doesn’t feel any worse than my Casio calculator watch did when I was 12. ;)
  • Had to read the directions to see how to turn it on (attach it to the charging cradle and it turns on automatically).
  • Setup currently requires opting in to some prerelease versions of a few Android packages. This presumably will be improved shortly!
  • Voice recognition is a bit spotty. I do wonder what the NSA thinks of my reminder to “resell my medications” (that was “refill”, silly Google!)
  • I wish there were more options for Gmail notifications, namely “mute” and “report spam”.

The ugly:

  • The 280×280 screen resolution looks rather blocky compared to today’s high-end circa-5″ 1080p phones. This is probably a tradeoff for battery life — the watch is already thicker than I’d like, and I wouldn’t want them to have to make the battery huger to last through a day!
  • I had some trouble with the device losing connectivity a couple of times; resetting BlueTooth off and on on the phone seemed to resolve it.

Still have to try:

  • Phone answering — I don’t make or receive a lot of voice calls so haven’t actually tried this yet. Not even sure if it just tells me to grab my phone or if it does some magic watch-speakerphone thing. Who knows? Time will tell.
  • App development — there seem to be two ways to go; either enhanced notifications, or native apps that run on the watch (like the little compass app or the pedometer). Haven’t tried yet, but downloaded the SDK…

iPhone size speculation

So there’s wide speculation out there that a larger-screened iPhone is coming to compete with the circa-5-inch generation of flagship Android phones.

But how would Apple actually engineer such a thing, and what would it mean for web and app developers?

There are a few possibilities to my mind, with various trade offs.

First, note that the iPhone 5 family has a 4″ 640×1136 screen, about 326dpi and using a 2x scale between UI points (aka “CSS pixels”). Software for iPhone had long assumed a 320×480 1x or 640×960 2x display, and when the new screen size was introduced, old apps were accommodated by showing them with black bars to simulate the older screen size.

The simplest solution would be to scale up the iPhone 5c/s design and screen by the same ratio as the iPad mini and iPad Air — this gives a 4.8 inch “iPhone 6″ that would have the same pixel density as the full-size Retina iPad. Developers would see the 4″ and 4.8″ devices as equivalent, with no changes needed to code or graphics. But, it might not provide the feeling of additional screen space because on screen elements would become larger to fit. The resolution, while still a respectable 263dpi or so would also fall noticeably short of the current crop of 1080p Android phones at 440+dpi.

Another possibility is to stick to the 326dpi density and change the screen’s pixel dimensions, say to 1280×720 at 4.5” or maybe a little higher. This would give more onscreen space, requiring app developers to ensure they handle the different dimensions. Older apps without AutoLayout might be handled by a black screen border like iPhone apps running on an iPad, or they might scale up and be a little blurry.

Some might scoff at such a change, but iOS SDK updates have made it easier to handle varying screen sizes, from iOS 6’s introduction of AutoLayout to iOS 8’s storyboard unification and mysterious “variable sized iPhone simulator”… The idea that Apple might spring a new form factor at us in fall 2014 is not any crazier than when they sprung the 4” iPhone 5 on us…

Still another question is whether Apple will follow the dpi race that they started with the iPhone 4’s “retina” screen… Would they make a 1080p phone in the 4.5-5″ range using a 3x display scale to match Android? There’s nothing in the iOS SDK that hints that way to me, but it’s plausible technically.

A 3x density scale might handle back-compatibility by rendering to a 2x frame buffer and transparently scaling up at some cost of blurriness, while newer apps use @3x artwork and render natively at proper scale.

This remains to be seen…