LG G Watch has Android Wear and water resistance, available for $229 (hands-on)

How many smartwatches can the market sustain at one time? This year we’re likely to find out. The latest to be added to the list is LG’s most recent smartwatch, the G Watch. Showcased at Google I/O 2014, the device is one of the first three (alongside the Samsung Gear Live and the Moto 360 by Motorola) smartwatches to run on Google’s wearable OS, Android Wear. The G Watch will be available today for online preorder at the Play Store for $229.

Design

Forged out of a single, unibody piece of steel, the G Watch weighs a slight 0.13 pounds (63 grams) and measures 37.9mm long, 46.5mm wide, and 9.95mm thick. It has no physical buttons and comes in two color variants, white gold and black titan, but its band can be interchanged with a number of standard watchbands. The device is equipped with a 1.65-inch LCD touchscreen display with a 280×280-pixel resolution.

It is also dust- and water-resistant, and can be submerged in a meter of water for up to 30 minutes. During a demo video, we watched an actress step into the shower with the G Watch without skipping a beat. Of course, we’ll know more when we officially test this feature out for ourselves.

During our hands-on time with the device, we noticed that the screen was responsive and sensitive to touch, and swiping through the screen felt easy and familiar. As for its physicality, while it’s easy to imagine the smartwatch being comfortably worn for certain people, it can easily feel bulky for those who have smaller wrists. CNET’s Lynn La noted that the G Watch covered her entire wrist altogether, and even when fastened to the last buckle loop, the device still moved around loosely.

Wearing the LG G Watch (pictures)
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Running Google’s Android Wear

Google’s specialized Android Wear OS for wearables enables you to automatically sync your smartwatch to your Android phone. The G Watch is compatible with handsets running Android 4.3 or later, and can receive a number of app notifications. Users can swipe these notifications away with the watch, decline an incoming call, even reply with a preset SMS message.

Working with the Google Now, the company’s digital assistant service, the watch can estimate your route to work, let you know if your flight is on time, and display your boarding pass when you arrive at the airport.

Because it supports voice command, you can also record voice memos or activate commands. Simply say “OK, Google: set an alarm for 7am,” and your watch’s alarm to start blaring at the appropriate time the next day.

If the notifications get to be too much, there is a “do not disturb” mode you can activate. The function is easy enough to access when we did it — just swipe down on the display, and a small dialogue appears telling you to shut off notifications and any incoming messages.

Hardware specs

The G Watch is powered by a Snapdragon 400 processor from Qualcomm and a 400mAh battery, which has a reported stand by time of about 36 hours. LG told us that the watch does not have an off button, and therefore will run continually. To juice all that power, the device comes with a square charging base that magnetically connected to the watch through five pins.

It is equipped with Bluetooth 4.0, a built-in compass, an accelerometer, and a gyrometer as well. Its capacity includes 512MB of storage, and 4GB of eMMC storage.

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