Google recently released Android Wear, their new platform for wearables that currently has only three devices running it. The first two to be released were the LG G Watch and the Samsung Gear Live. Within the last couple days the Motorola Moto 360 was released for sale. These are the first generation of Google powered smart watches.

Samsung’s Gear Live offering is a nice piece with a few nice features. The body of the watch has a metal housing with a plastic back that incorporates an optical heart rate monitor and the charging contacts. The charger is essentially a backpack that hugs the contacts on the underside of the watch. The watchband is 22mm straps made of nice feeling plastic that has a metal tip that buttons into the band’s holes. This part is user replaceable and the securing method doesn’t seem as a buckle would be.

The interface for Android Wear is made up of cards, just like Google Now. It essentially will show you everything on the watch that would normally show up in your notification area on Android. Some like Google’s own apps will have nice cards, while others are really just the text from the notification. Using the interface is mostly swiping cards to close or expand them and move through the cards. Currently, there are not too many decent apps that can be found in the Play Store. The Navigation app’s tiles are by far some of the best uses of the watch. While driving there is no need to keep looking at your phone and the next directions will be fed to new tiles that are alerted by vibrating. Using it while going on a road trip to a new area was very pleasant since more time was spent watching traffic than down at the phone’s screen.

The Gear Live is IP67 certified for dust and water resistance, this equates to it is dust tight and withstanding immersion in 1m for a duration of 30m. It will be just fine in the shower, but probably not something that should be taken to the pool. The heart rate monitor and pedometer are not too accurate and should be used as a best guess for the info they provide. The battery is very small at 300mAh and can only last for a day of use. The display is a brilliantly vivid Super AMOLED touchscreen though does have the shortcoming in this design of having no ambient light sensor. The display will dim and then wake (brighten) when the wrist is rotated to view the watch face, but many times this had to be done upwards of 4 or more times to get a response. The voice commands are the same as Google Now, as it uses that app on the phone to complete everything.

Is it worth it?

Coming in at $200 this makes it an attractive price for such a gadget, though with the glaring drawbacks that this has it may be advisable to wait for the next generation. The fact that this has only a days worth of battery is the biggest drawback since you will need to charge it often, unlike the Qualcomm Toq. Having this rely on a constant Bluetooth connection means that it will drain your phone’s battery as long as it is connected. Overall, this is a great start, but there are many reasons to check what is on the horizon of Android Wear before deciding on the Gear Live.

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In a somewhat unsurprising move, Verizon will be offering the LG G3 on their network starting July 17th. They will also be offering LG’s G Watch as an accessory to the LG G3 as well. However, thanks to the awesome 2-year contract price of the LG G3, of $99.99 the LG G Watch will actually cost most consumers more than double the money up front.

The LG G Watch (below) will retail on Verizon’s network as an accessory to the LG G3 (or any Android phone) for $229. Both this watch and the smartphone have been highly anticipated since their initial launches a month ago. Details about the LG G Watch have been slowly trickling out thanks to Google, as LG appears to have been holding a lot about the watch back until Google talked about Android wear features at Google I/O.

LG G Watch on Verizon

This means that LG’s G3 is likely going to bring some serious competition to Samsung and HTC who both currently sell their phones on Verizon at $99.99 as well (after originally selling for $199-ish back in April). The awesome part is that the G3 is already coming in at a lower retail price ($599) which enables it to come in at a more competitive on-contract price of $99.99 at launch. Additionally, you can also get this phone on an Edge plan for $30 a month, but then you’re basically paying a ton of money not to even own the phone. And yes, it will be XLTE (carrier aggregation) which will combine Verizon’s 700 MHz and AWS spectrum to deliver more download capacity.

Overall it should be great to see the smartphone companies competing with another and giving consumers really good choices. And it is also good to see that the carriers are also giving more affordable on-contract prices, which may make selling something like an iPhone 6 even more difficult at $199 or even the rumored $299 on contract.

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