LG's W7 watch looks like the most stupid smartwatch of the year



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Android smartwatches may be as dead as Android tablets, but this does not prevent OEMs from continuing to pump these small packages of sadness to the wrist. The latest is LG's "Hybrid" smart watch, the W7 Watch, which complements the usual Wear OS hardware by placing physical analog watch hands on top of the screen.

The hands of the watch look great in LG's press releases, which never show that the face of the watch, but if you try to use one of the "smart" features of your smart watch you will soon realize how bad this idea is. The physical hands of the watch constantly hide the display, making it difficult to visualize text and buttons on your smartwatch. To make matters worse, the hands of the watch must be connected to the gear required in the body of the watch; so there is also a large hole in the center of your small 1.2 inch screen. To do things even more Even worse, the layout contains the screen, then the hands of the watch, and then the glass cover. So there is a large air gap between the screen and the screen cache. As we learned in early smartphone models, not sticking the display to the hull negatively affects the brightness and contrast of the display.

Google's Wear OS is certainly not designed to work with physical watch hands, so you will always have to fight against the watch hands and the display hole to try and see what's really up to l & # 39; screen. LG has at least one Band-Aid solution for the hands of the watch. You can press a side button and leave the hands of the watch. switch to horizontal mode temporarily, which hides a little less screen. The main advantage of the physical watch hands is that you can turn off the part of the smart watch and operate in "watch only" mode for 100 days, but at this point you may want to simply buy a regular watch. The watch hands are also available for some LG applications, so they can be used as a compass pointer or stopwatch.

The specifications are also a disaster. The Watch W7 uses the two-year-old Qualcomm Wear 2100 SoC instead of the new Wear 3100 announced a month ago. Packing in a physical hand motion means that there is not enough room for many of the components of a good smart watch. As a result, the Watch W7 can not track fitness or decent payments due to lack of NFC, GPS, and heart rate monitor. . This means that the watch is only really useful as a notification machine, but again, it is awful, thanks to the hole in the center of the screen and the hands of the watch.

The real thing is that it all costs more than a brand new Apple Watch. The LG Watch W7 is $ 450 and launches Oct. 14.

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