Ticwatches are terrible! (and maybe all android watches)

[glenimp617]

Had my ticwatch S2 a week and finally returned it. What an awful, AWFUL piece of technology. It's designed as a sports watch, yet fails at being a watch....and fails at being a sports watch too.

The negatives:

1. Can't see the display outdoors, so useless as a watch

2. Battery life went from 100% to 40% after a 1hr jog

3. Performance is absolutely awful. Trying to select a playlist on google music, and setting up a workout in google fit resulted in the watch going blank and returning to the watchface. Everything stutters to a crawl. If the phone detects an update, say goodbye to using it for the next ten minutes. Pressing the back or next button for music takes 5 seconds....and more often than not you have to press the button multiple times.

4. Bluetooth connections cuts out 2-3 times an hour (maybe due to the older v4 technology)

5. Spotify refuses to support offline playback for wear os (not really a ticwatch issue but still)

6. Mobvoi support is really bad. Had to jump through so many hoops, fill in forms and take photos before they would issue an RMA (went with them over Amazon as they were a tenner cheaper at the time)

The positives:

Erm....

So, I took a punt on the Samsung Galaxy watch as Argos is doing A-Grade customer returns for £170. Watching youtube unboxing videos, at least the performance looks acceptable. So long as I can listen to music when out jogging and maybe track a bit through a sports app (I know it supports spotify offline playback and strava) I'll be happy.

 

[Mekrel]

I've been saying this for quite sometime now that Android Wear is such a terrible platform, it's basically Android Tablets 2.0 and it wouldn't surprise me if it goes the way of the Dodo in the future.

Put any Android Wear watch against an Apple Watch (doesn't even need to be the 4 series) or a Galaxy Watch and it's night and day how terrible the platform is. I had the LG Watch Sport which was the poster device for Android Wear 2.0 and it was designed by LG in partnership with Google and I felt completely ripped off.

There's just too many things that need to be changed & I don't believe Google have either the desire or OEM support to turn the ship around. Qualcomm aren't really that interested, despite news this past couple of weeks they're designing new wearable chips (basically cut down mobile SoC on a smaller process) but based on how the 3100 was a flop compared to the hype behind it, I wouldn't hold my breath for these new chips. Secondly, Google are making the EXACT same mistake on WearOS that they made with Honeycomb & Android TV - they're shoehorning cut down versions of Android onto platforms that aren't powerful enough to run it.

You'll enjoy the Galaxy Watch, Tizen is so much better than Android when it comes to wearables and their Exynos SoC is so much more efficient than anything Qualcomm are providing.

I had a Sony Bravia Android TV - it failed at the basics TVs have been getting right for decades and that's smooth UI. Changed to an LG OLED WebOS TV and it's such a better experience.

 

[glenimp617]

I've been saying this for quite sometime now that Android Wear is such a terrible platform, it's basically Android Tablets 2.0 and it wouldn't surprise me if it goes the way of the Dodo in the future.

Put any Android Wear watch against an Apple Watch (doesn't even need to be the 4 series) or a Galaxy Watch and it's night and day how terrible the platform is. I had the LG Watch Sport which was the poster device for Android Wear 2.0 and it was designed by LG in partnership with Google and I felt completely ripped off.

There's just too many things that need to be changed & I don't believe Google have either the desire or OEM support to turn the ship around. Qualcomm aren't really that interested, despite news this past couple of weeks they're designing new wearable chips (basically cut down mobile SoC on a smaller process) but based on how the 3100 was a flop compared to the hype behind it, I wouldn't hold my breath for these new chips. Secondly, Google are making the EXACT same mistake on WearOS that they made with Honeycomb & Android TV - they're shoehorning cut down versions of Android onto platforms that aren't powerful enough to run it.

You'll enjoy the Galaxy Watch, Tizen is so much better than Android when it comes to wearables and their Exynos SoC is so much more efficient than anything Qualcomm are providing.

I had a Sony Bravia Android TV - it failed at the basics TVs have been getting right for decades and that's smooth UI. Changed to an LG OLED WebOS TV and it's such a better experience.

I have a feeling Google aren't spending much time on it as they are concentrating on the Fuchsia OS which is designed for all devices (inc wearables). They do need a strong hardware partner and SOC though.
Who knows, maybe in the future we'll see a Samsung watch running Fuchsia.