Sony was making smartwatches long before the Apple Watch became a reality. In fact, it's on the third iteration of its smartwatch device, and it's easily its best to date.
From fitness applications to a handy way to take notes, the Sony device is a useful addition to your smart device lineup.
The SmartWatch 3 improves on the design. It’s sleeker than before, with a silicon strap you can swap out for brighter colours. And it doesn’t feel quite as chunky as previous offerings.
It’s based on Android Wear, Google’s platform for wearables. That means you need apps specifically developed for Wear, available from the Play store. Not everything is Wear compatible, but the number of available apps is rising.
You’ll still need a smartphone; this review teamed the SmartWatch 3 with both a Galaxy Note 4 and an Xperia Z3 Compact. You don’t need a Sony phone to use it, though obviously it has to be Android handset.
The watch comes with a 1.2GHz chip and 512M of RAM. There’s 4GB of storage, and it has ambient light sensors, an accelerometer, a compass, gyro and GPS. It’s also got NFC and Bluetooth 4.0 for wireless communications.
The good
Sony’s SmartWatch offers built-in GPS. If you want to track your run, you don’t have to lug your smartphone with you; just load an app onto your watch. It’s quite a new update for the Android Wear platform, but My Tracks will use the GPS data for runners.
There are other more familiar run trackers available for the Wear platform, and the data is fed into the Google Fit set up so you can keep an eye on your daily progress.
With such a small screen, the traditional touch interface won’t work as well, but gesture and voice controls can fill in the gaps. The SmartWatch 3 allows you to dictate messages and emails to your wrist, set alarms and reminders or swipe away Google Now cards that feed you details on weather, upcoming events etc.
The voice recognition is quite good, although there were a few missteps. The voice control for contacts produced some hilarious results, particularly with less familiar Irish names. But for the most part, barking “Okay Google” at your wrist and then a command produced the intended result.
As email notifications pop up on your wrist, you can archive them with a swipe or reply using voice commands, directly from your wrist. Talking to your wrist is a bit disconcerting, but once you get over that it’s the easiest way to take control.
Its battery lasts between a day and a half and two days. The charger is micro USB, which means no cradles to mess about with, no proprietary chargers, and no expense trying to hunt down the power supply when you inevitably lose it.
The SmartWatch 3 controls your music too, and with Android Wear you can store your favourite tracks for offline use. You’ll need Bluetooth headphones though, as there’s no headphone jack on the device. And who would want one anyway?
The not so good
The Smart Watch 3 is still a small screened device. It’s 320 x 320 pixels, and at 1.6 inches it can be a difficult to see the screen when you’re on the move. It’s not the best quality, but it passes muster.
You can’t take calls on it, like Galaxy Gear, although it will notify you when there’s an incoming call on your handset, and it lacks the heart rate monitor that’s in the Gear Fit, which would have been a nice extra for runners.
It is only compatible with Android phones, so Windows Phone users or iPhone owners need to keep hunting. It’s designed for use with phones running Android 4.3 and newer.
The rest
There are plenty of apps available for Android wear, from note taking on Evernote or One Note, to custom watch faces and an audio recorder. Even dating apps are making an appearance. There are is also the obligatory fitness software, with Runtastic, Strava and RunKeeper all developing Wear-friendly apps. You can track your sleep, play a few games, turn your smartwatch into a flashlight or use the (teeny tiny) screen as a remote viewfinder for the camera in your smartphone.
It will alert you if you move too far from your phone, and help you find it. As an added bonus, the device is water resistant.
Verdict
Sony’s best yet, it should find fans among fitness users.
