LG’s latest smartwatch is the company’s first “hybrid” model which features mechanical hands combined with a digital display.
The LG Watch W7 gets up to 100 days of battery life when used strictly in mechanical mode with the smart features disabled. Or you can use it as a smartwatch, but you’ll only get two days of battery life (although it will still work in analog mode to continue showing you the time for another 3-4 days even after your battery runs down too low for smart functions).
The hybrid device isn’t cheap though: it’s expected to go up for pre-order on October 7th for $450 before showing up in stores on October 14th.
The watch features a 1.2 inch, 360 x 360 pixel LCD display with 300 pixels per inch, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 2100 processor, 768MB of LPDDR3 RAM and 4GB of eMMC storage.
It’s powered by a 240 mAh battery and the LG Watch 7 features 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.2, and a USB 2.0 Type-C port. It has a 9-axis motion sensor and a pressure sensor. And the watch is rated IP68 for water and dust resistance.
It’s missing some features you might expect from a high-end smartwatch in 2018. There’s no support for GPS or NFC, so you can’t use it for mobile payments or for navigation or run tracking when your phone is at home. And the battery is on the small side.
But it’s a nice looking watch that you can actually use as a watch for days, weeks, or months at a time between charges. And if you want smartphone alerts, it can show those too… for up to two days at a time.
Other than lasting longer, this watch is not much better than MyKronos ZeTime
$450 and it’s missing the two things I’d want a smartwatch for. So what if you can tell time with it when the battery is low? A regular watch will do that, too!
Seeing what is out on the market now just makes me miss Pebble that much more. I hope mine never dies.
You still have Xiaomi Huami Bip, it’s not a perfect replacement for Pebble, but when your Pebble finally gives up, there might be second, third etc. gen. on a market 😉
By then Huami might get on the level of Pebble, battery life, GPS, sleep tracking, heart-rate, basic activities they already figured out.