Metawatch Review

In one word, Superb.

In many words, the Meta is one of the nicest watches I have had round my wrist. Not just nicest Smartwatch, but watch. The thick, real leather strap is high quality and tough which is a blessing for me as silicone does not agree with my skin. I have the Frame model which is the classier of the current gen watches. It has a thick steel body with 6 buttons on the side and a solid glass front. When I say solid glass I mean impact resistant which I found out a few days ago.

Unfortunately the pin holding the leather strap is perhaps not as strong as one would hope. I was standing on a lorry loading bay when I pulled my hand out of my pocket in response to a notification on my Metawatch. The watch seemed to catch on my trouser leg and the pin popped out, causing the watch to slide off my wrist and drop about 11 feet onto the concrete below. And what was the damage? Almost nothing. A tiny set of scratches in the top left corner but nothing on the face itself. I really am impressed with the quality of the parts although I would like to see the strap more secure in the next iteration.

Using the latest Bluetooth 4.0 is a huge bonus to any connected device. The Metawatch seems to sip battery from both its own, and the phone. In my testing of the watch I have found the battery lasts at least 5 days sometimes longer. When I first received the device it lasted 7 days but since connecting it to my KitKat device I have been able to add it to the “receive all notifications list” and of course the extra functionality it has now comes at the cost of battery life.

The widget system on the watch is helpful I suppose but I’ll be honest, I rarely use them. The clock face is so nice to just have as a watch that I leave on a full screen face. The notifications are really what set

Here’s where it goes a little “Pear Shaped” you might say. The app is really quite a dated and ugly-looking thing. As far as I can tell it uses no Holo guidelines or indeed any artisitic design at all. Ok it does what it should do I suppose, it lets you change the widgets on the device and some basic settings but it is very limited. The widgets consist of around 8 widgets of varying sizes that show you basic information. I would love to see this expand into many more as it is incredibly limiting right now. For example, there is a Stocks widget and a StocksTwit widget (Stocks in Twitter format) but no Twitter widget. The widget that is missing most though is an analogue clock face. With the pure class that this phone exudes it really should have a good round clock face.