Introduction
The Sony SmartBand Talk SWR30 is an experiment, a way to make wearable tech that goes against the grain a little. While Samsung, Motorola and LG are all battling to make the ultimate Android Wear watch, this little wrist tracker takes a few more cues from the Pebble smartwatch.
It doesn't have an interface shared with loads of other smart devices that'll get richer and richer as the months pass. You will never play games on the thing, unless someone hacks the feature in.
It's simple. And maybe that's OK. For some people, maybe that's more than OK: great, even. What Sony's out to do with the Sony SmartBand Talk makes sense in a market where we're still seeing what we actually want wearable tech to do in our lives.
Only the price is a bit of a sticking point. At £130 (US$169.99, AU$199) it's more than the latest price for the original Pebble or LG G Watch. Sure, it can take calls too, but for most people that's a side attraction at best. This band is pretty expensive for what you get.
The SmartBand Talk looks more like a fitness tracker than a watch until you notice the great big time read-out on its screen. It looks like a gadget, that's certain, but it's otherwise a pretty innocuous presence.
At 24g it's so light I actually forgot it was on my wrist at times, this coming from someone who doesn't wear an ordinary watch day-in, day-out.
There's no real high-end feel here as the strap is rubber rather than leather or metal, but it's very comfortable. It's not just because of the light weight, but also the way the back of the SmartBand Talk is lightly curved to match most people's wrists. It certainly matched mine.
The Sony SmartBand Talk comes with two straps as well. That you can remove the strap isn't too obvious from the start, as it fits in near-seamlessly with the core plastic part that holds the screen, hooked in place with plastic anchors on the back.
This sort of a design is a good thing, even if it did have me wondering whether I had the slender arms of a young girl when having to use the tightest setting bar. Instead, there are small and larger straps and, sure enough, I had the larger one attached.
It uses a clasp-style mechanism to keep the band attached to your wrist, with little metal mushrooms you push through the strap's holes to secure it. It's nothing fancy, but is also very low-fuss, even compared with a standard watch strap.
How little you have to think about the SmartBand Talk is one of its great strengths. It's water resistant, and I wore it in the shower on a daily basis without any issue.
It's certified to the IP68 standard, meaning it's totally dust-proof and can be submerged in water. As ever, you're only meant to dunk the Sony SmartBand Talk in fresh water: so no swimming in the sea, or swimming pools. The salt and chemicals in those bodies of water are enough to rule them out: do so at your own risk.
The little part that's crucial to this waterproofing is a little rubber cap that plugs up the microUSB port used to charge the Sony SmartBand Talk. The rest is already primed for the wet stuff.
Fairly small, light and comfortable, the design isn't flashy but it works. You can also get more colourful straps, if the choice of a black or white watch just isn't jazzy enough for your tastes. It's the screen that you should really take note of though.
Unlike big-name smartwatches like the LG G Watch and Motorola Moto 360, the Sony SmartBand Talk uses an e-ink display. It's just 1.4 inches across and offers resolution of 296 x 128, which is pretty low.
Low resolution matters much less in an e-ink screen than an LCD one, though. E-ink uses tiny little white and black microcapsules that are raised and lowered to form a monochrome image, and as such you don't get the 'bitty' look that low-res LCD screens can have, as their displays are actually made of dots of red, green and blue with black bits in-between.
What results is a screen that, while a bit jaggedy, is very easy on the eye. E-ink doesn't use a screen backlight or any form of lighting, meaning you're at the mercy of ambient light to see the screen.
The Talk only needs a little bit of light to be clear, but in pure darkness you're out of luck. You can also invert the display, although I found the standard view clearer.
Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite uses a clever light cast over the front of the screen to make its e-ink display visible at night, but I guess we'll have to wait until the next incarnation of the SmartBand Talk.
Why e-ink when it's monochrome and not lit? It's all about battery life. E-ink only uses significant power when changing what it displays. Keep the image the same and it drains virtually no energy.
In this case, that change occurs every minute, once a minute, when the time changes. It seems the screen is still one of the main power draws as battery stamina didn't change too much depending on my level of activity. Over two of weeks of use I got three days or slightly over, each time.
That's a lot more than the day and a half you might get out of an LG G Watch R, but is ultimately quite disappointing still. The Sony SmartBand Talk has just a 70mAh battery: absolutely tiny. The Pebble watch lasts for five to seven days, which is what I'd have like to have seen here.
It's not just watches the SWR30 has to compete with either. Fitness trackers generally last for longer, such as the five day Fitbit Flex and the Garmin Vivofit, which lasts a whole year.
The screen is not touch sensitive in the manner of a smartphone either, but you can alert the phone by giving the Sony SmartBand Talk two strong taps, which sets off the accelerometer.
For the most part, though, I ended up using the metal buttons on the side of the band. There are three, a 'power' button and a volume rocker. When you're out and about pressing the power button takes you to the info screen, where you can see your day's activity, which is in my book the main point of the SmartBand Talk.
Interface and fitness
There's so little interface to the Sony SmartBand Talk it's almost comical. There's the screen that tells you the time, your activity screen and that's it, at least when it's first taken out of the box.
While you can take calls and pipe through notifications to the band from your phone, these pop up as and when needed, only to disappear without a trace, never to be dredged up again.
Like most fitness trackers, you need to hook the Sony SmartBand Talk up to a phone or tablet to use it properly. The two communicate using Bluetooth 4.0.
There's a dedicated SmartBand Talk app that lets you tweak the sort of settings you just don't have access to in the band itself. These include choosing whether to receive notifications and calls, whether to use the alarm and the mini watch apps you want to see on the Talk. I'll look into exactly what's on offer in the next section.
However, what about fitness? The band is designed to hook into the Lifelog app, which tracks all of your activity. Not just exercise either, but how many photos you take, how much music you listen to, how many games you play. The Sony SmartBand Talk is just a part of it.
Its tracking is also pretty limited. At the time of writing, it's designed to track walking and running, using cadence detection.
In other words, it's an accelerometer-based pedometer with enough smarts to know that the jogs of your body will be a bit snappier when you run, compared to walking.
There's no GPS and, more pertinent among this crowd of trackers, no altimeter. This measures how high up you are, and in some Fitbit fitness trackers is used to see how many flights of stairs you've climbed. Clearly Fitbit think we're more likely to trudge up buildings than mountains. A fair assumption.
You can set a goal for each day, but that's the extent of the fidelity to the tracking here at this point.
There are a few disappointments in this. First, it doesn't support sleep tracking, yet. Sony says this will be implemented in time, but it's not there at present. This is pretty disappointing when a great many rivals have offered it for a while. It's a bit late for a tracker like this to offer 'coming soon' extras as basic as sleep tracking.
You also can't farm out your tracking data to other fitness apps, as you can with a great many rivals including Android Wear trackers. If you don't like the way Sony Lifelog works, you're done for at this point.
I can hope that the Sony SmartBand Talk API might open up, but it seems a bit optimistic when Sony's focus is going to be on building up Lifelog, not offering alternatives.
The Sony SmartBand Talk isn't going to satisfy regular runners who'll want a GPS watch either, or those who want to compete with their fitness band owning friends on the Fitbit or Endomondo platforms. It doesn't have a heart rate sensor, either, which is becoming more common in fitness trackers by the month.
The Talk isn't absurdly generous with its steps in the way some rivals are, though. Plenty of wrist trackers over-report your figures.
I do also like the way the screen lets you check out your daily steps figure and your time of walking/running for the day with the press of a button. Screen-less fitness trackers don't get you this and it takes away much of the fun of using one.
Features and competition
What can the Sony SmartBand Talk do apart from tell you how many times you've put one foot in front of the other? Fresh out of the box, not too much.
By default, you'll get notifications to the band, much the same as you'd see in the notifications bar of your phone or tablet. You just get that, though: notifications. Don't expect to read through your emails, even the ones the notification refers to. Only the first bits of information are available.
Of course, a lot of the time that's exactly what you'd want on a device like this. You get to know who your emails and texts are from, a pretty good indication of whether you'll want to check them out on your phone or not.
If you want a smartwatch that can do virtually everything your phone can, though, the SmartBand Talk is not what you want.
The other basic bit of extra functionality is, as the name suggests, phone calls. You can have calls patched through to the Talk. It has a little speaker built-in, and a microphone. You can see the outlets for these on the band's underside.
The Sony SmartBand Talk's speaker is way too quiet to cut through much ambient noise, and because of the less directed way you'd take calls with the band, a multi-mic active noise cancellation layout wouldn't really work too well here. That'll be one of the reasons why there's just a single mic.
There remains the most important problem: why on earth would you want to take calls on the Sony SmartBand Talk? Not only is the clarity worse for both parties, you'll look pretty silly too.
The alarm function feels a bit more suited to the band. A vibrate motor and the little speaker let the SmartBand Talk piggy-back off the alarm settings of your phone to wake you up. Being woken-up from your wrist takes some getting used to, but it'll make the Talk the full 24/7 package once sleep tracking has been implemented.
There are other features available, but you need to add them in the SmartBand Talk app. It's available for just about all Android 4.4 phones, not just Sony ones.
Calling these little extras apps might be overstating it though, although I imagine Sony may add more extras to the Sony SmartBand Talk in the coming months.
The most useful of the lot is the music remote. Working much like a single-button remote on the in-line controls of your earphones, a solid tap on the band works like a play/pause button, and you can switch back and forth with multiple taps.
I did find this much less responsive than actually using an in-line remote, but this comes with the territory most of the time when using a Bluetooth controller rather than a wired one. Latency may not be drastically awful with Bluetooth, but it does result in a noticeable delay most of the time.
You can also add a bunch of others, again fairly basic things but all-important to the SmartBand Talk's being able to offer more than just a fitness tracker with a clock. You download these as apps from Google Play, but you can see the listing of what's available from within the SmartBank Talk app:
Smart Camera: tap to take a photo, with your phone/tablet, not the band (which has no camera).
Weather: Display temperature and weather stats for your chosen city.
Smart Control: Toggle a selected feature on your phone (Wi-Fi, phone speaker, radio) or show the phone's battery level.
Voice Control: Lets you talk to the SmartBand in order to issue basics commands to the phone, such as 'Call X', 'What is the weather' and 'Read last SMS message'. You need to be quite specific in the wording of your questions, but otherwise it works reasonably well. As with any voice assistant, though: will you use it?
Voice Recorder: Lets you talk to the SmartBand Talk like Captain Kirk emoting away to his tricorder. The files are then saved on your phone/tablet.
If the SmartBand Talk is capable of all these extra bits, why are they not packed in from the start? Well, the more you pack in, the more sluggish the band feels. It's not that the actual device slows down, but that you need to cycle through these mini-apps in turn in order to use them, by pressing the button on the side repeatedly. Thanks to the slow refresh rates of the e-ink screen, this is not a terribly slick process.
It's best to keep as few of these mini apps on-board as possible. For my uses, for example, I chucked out everything bar the fitness tracker, the media control and the weather 'widget'. This sort of app load-out gives you a good balance of features and speed. Actually using the Talk with even just eight applets feels depressingly leaden.
Sony has done its best to work with the limitation here, though, giving you control over the order of these apps.
A fair number of smart-style features are on offer here, but each is very basic by design, and the SmartBand Talk simply doesn't work too well if you embrace too many of them.
The Competition
Samsung Gear Fit
The Samsung Gear Fit offers a much snazzier-looking colour OLED screen and has a heart rate sensor, while getting you fairly similar smart features.
However, it doesn't really compare to the Talk in terms of sheer immediacy when you pare the Sony down to its basics, and the lighter Sony band 'disappears' on your wrist much more easily. Battery life is around the same for both bands: about three days of solid use.
- Read our full Samsung Gear Fit review
Fitbit Charge/Flex
Fitbit offers several wrist-worn fitness trackers, including the Fitbit Flex and Charge. The main difference is that the Charge uses a full (but tiny) OLED display while the Flex just has little pips that tell you how close you are to reaching your daily steps target.
You don't get the notifications and smartwatch features with a Fitbit, but both offer better third-party app support and the Charge has an altimeter.
- Read our full Fitbit Flex and Fitbit Charge review
Pebble watch
There are two Pebble watches, the original and the Steel version, but thanks to its lower price the original is probably the fiercer rival for the SmartBand Talk.
It offers a similar style and similar hardware, with a slightly chunkier design. Smart features are similarly simple, but the slightly greater four to five day battery life and cheaper price are big wins for the Pebble. Those feeling flush may want to try out the seven-day-stamina Pebble Steel.
- Read our full original Pebble and Pebble Steel review
LG G Watch R
How about an Android Wear watch like the LG G Watch R? It'll let you participate in the smartwatch revolution to an extent that the SmartBand Talk simply won't.
You'll get far more advanced integration with your phone than the Sony provides. However, watches like the G Watch R can seem like work-in-progress efforts, mostly because of their battery life.
With around 1.5 day stamina, current Android Wear watches won't actually outlast your phone.
- Read our full LG G watch R review
Sony SmartBand SWR10
Sony also makes a much more affordable band, the SWR10. This takes out most features, and doesn't have a display.
Instead, you get fitness tracking that syncs in the background with your phone, and a vibrate function that pipes-up whenever you get a call or text. It's basic and sadly doesn't replace a watch. However, it does cost £50 (around $75, AU$95) making it a bit of a bargain.
Verdict
The Sony SmartBand Talk SWR30 is very easy to live with. It's incredibly light and I didn't suffer from any skin irritation issues during our tests. It's not for people after the very latest smart features, but as a clock plus fitness tracker, it's pretty neat.
However, it does feel a little overpriced. At £130 (US$169.99, AU$199) you're paying a fair bit for technology that is less than cutting-edge. I have a sneaking suspicion the price will drop before too long, though, which should make the Talk easier to recommend.
We liked
The light frame makes the SmartBand Talk very comfortable to wear day in, day out without discomfort. I noticed no irritation caused by the rubbery band either.
The e-ink display looks a lot nicer than a low-res LCD in daylight, and suffers from none of the view angle problems conventional displays can suffer from.
When tasked with light duties, the Talk feels quick and convenient, switching between roles and a basic notifications pager, watch and fitness tracker with ease.
We disliked
Three-day battery life is acceptable, but nothing more. Taking into account the use of an e-ink screen and the tiny 70mAh, it seems a missed opportunity that the SmartBand Talk doesn't have at least 5-7 day stamina.
This is not a serious fitness tracker, with no altimeter, no GPS and no heart rate sensor. For a wrist-worn device accuracy doesn't seem too bad, but it's not going to be top-notch either.
The more smart features you plug into the band, the more sluggish it is to operate. Keep your smartwatch expectations low in order to have the best experience with this band.
Verdict
While a bit expensive the Sony SmartBand Talk is pleasantly simple in hardware and interface. It offers a smartwatch and fitness combo for those not too bothered about experiencing everything the smartwatch revolution has to offer.
from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/1t6g3ym
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