The LG G Watch is one of the first smartwatches to ship with Google’s Android Wear software. First unveiled in March, the G Watch officially goes on sale at the Google Play store today, where it will join the recently unveiled Samsung Gear Live.
The G Watch has a $229 price tag, which is about par for the course with smartwatches these days.
So LG is finally breaking out detailed specs for its watch.
The G Watch features a 1.65 inch, 280 x 280 pixel IPS display, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of built-in storage, a 400mAh battery, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor.
It features Bluetooth 4.0, has an IP67 water and dust resistant case, and sensors including a gyroscope, accelerometer, and compass. It’ll be available in black or white and gold.
The LG G Watch has a bigger battery than Samsung’s smartwatch, but lacks the heart rate monitor you get with the Samsung Gear Live. Samsung’s watch also has a higher resolution 320 x 320 pixel display… but honestly, on a screen this small it’d probably be tough to see the difference.
AT&T also plans to offer the G Watch soon.
Rather pathetic that folks are using phone SoCs for a watch, not the best idea cost and power usage wise.It’s a bit unclear what SoC Samsung is using but it might explain why LG has a bigger battery,they need it.
Anyway, very poor attempt and at 229$ is about 150$ too much.
The res thing, 280×280 and 1.65 inch diagonal means some 240ppi so somewhere in the middle between a 5.5 inch 720p phone and 7 inch 1280×800 tablet.(almost like the 6 inch 720p LG Flex i guess). In the end ,they used w/e they thought would work, the screen is small and cheap so as devices evolve things will settle and the cost difference between high res and low res is very small so it won’t be much of a factor. To be fair far more important than res, are the bezels Here space really matters.
So says someone who clearly doesn’t understand the costs and technical difficulties of producing a quality device this small this early in the game. You make it sound as though all they had to do what choose the right components and they would have a $75 Google Wear watch they could sell for a profit.
No actually they are trying to get huge margins ,the costs are low on these devices.
The LG screen is 9 square cm while a 7 inch tablet with similar pixel density that costs 20$ with the touch layer is over 140 square cm
There is no 3G, no wifi, few sensors a low end SoC, little memory,little storage and a tiny battery.
This is dumbphone hardware they try to sell for ridiculous prices.
If anyone is ignorant, that’s you for not getting the simplicity of these devices.There is nothing spectacular about them and nothing to even slightly justify the price.
The screen should be a couple of $ but might cost 5$ for now, the SoC in the LG should be some 5$ but could be 2$ and Samsung is likely to be using worth that, the battery is like 1$ , the NAND and RAM maybe 4$. The parts in a watch like this are cheaper than the 20$ Firefox smartphone and even if the casing would cost 20$ you still got a BOM of under 40$ retailing for 200$. Sure if you fit more sensors and a bunch of other things into it costs would go up but that’s not the case here.
Yeah, because research and development costs and manufacturing start up costs don’t count, right?
But what about charging? Wireless or wired?
“but honestly, on a screen this small it’d probably be tough to see the difference” – they used to say that about phones too, you know…
I can’t tell the difference between my PC screen (only 768px tall) and a Macbook Retina display so. I guess what I’d have to say is that “on a screen this small it’d probably be tough to see the difference”.
Welcome to the world of marketing hype.
When you get to ~300 PPI on something that you hold further than a foot way from your face, it’s fairly true.