to open up my review of The qualcom Talk Smartwatch guys please the pronunciation
is talk like tick tock not to at least
until they release a Bob Marley Edition the number of people who have said that
to
me The Cooler Master glacer 240l CPU
Cooler delivers the convenience of an all-in-one and the performance of a
custom water cooler click now to learn more all right so front and center on
the talk is the 1 55 in mirol display
with a responsive accurate glass touchcreen that was much more difficult
to scratch than the plastic one on my Pebble the main selling points of
Mirasol are its power efficiency its visibility in direct sunlight and the
fact that it's color rather than monochrome all in all it is an
exceptional technology and I'm very excited to see Next Generation e-readers
and other smart devices that use it I do think qualcomm's marketing materials
have oversold it a bit though they're working on refining it but for now the
colors while present are not nearly as
vibrant as the promotional videos would have you believe now when it comes to
Performance Qualcomm isn't really talking about the hardware inside but
booting it up is fast navigation is Snappy so I guess I don't really care
what processor is inside or how much RAM it has more important to me is power
efficiency and I got similar battery life on my talk as I did on my Pebble
with its black and white display so you can color me impressed there pun
intended my only issue with the battery life is that I really don't know how it
would compare if the backlight behaved
the way that I want it to among the glaring emissions in qualcomm's
companion Android app is any kind of meaningful backlight Behavior adjustment
you can set the double tap speed um and
the timeout time but brightness control is missing as is accelerometer based
activation like the Pebbles wrist flick and there's also no option to have the
backlight illuminate automatically when a notification is received instead if
it's dark out I actually have to manually turn on the backlight it might
seem like a minor complaint but if you consider how prominently the always on
nature of the display so you can glance at your wrist and see what's on it at
any time featured in qualcomm's marketing it's obvious that they
understand the importance of not needing to touch it or do some contrived gesture
in order to read it so hopefully that'll be added soon so let's talk everyday use
the included wireless charging dock see unfolds like that is a big plus it uses
y power Le which boasts support for multiple devices at the same time and
with a larger charging field compared to Chi the clock flips 90° making it easy
to read on your bedside table and honestly the only thing missing here is
again a backlight thing is the option to keep the backlight on when it's charging
so it can completely replace the clock on my nightstand the fact that it's
waterproof is also great I actually didn't know that yet when I was giving
the baby a bath one night and I realized I was wearing it so Panic moment there
but to my relief it is indeed waterproof
it's also definitely a head turner I get a lot of people asking me about it which
is fun for techn files with the pebble people are like what the heck is that
whereas with this people are like oh that's cool what is that and I mean as
much as that might have something to do with my Pebble being bright orange either way you know I got to give credit
where credit is due people liked it they asked about it and it's fun the vibrate
is both easy to feel and not unnecessarily loud um as I said before
it's very responsive which leads us to the main menu uh each icon on the main
screen represents an applet which is their name for an app there aren't
really many available but what is there works pretty well there's weather uh
stock checking message log call history and of course music control which I use
a lot navigation is super intuitive just
swipe from the sides when you want to go back or forward and I really liked being
able to go back into my notification history much more easily than with my
Pebble where things just kind of seemed to disappear there is one thing I
noticed that must be a bug though
individual emails show up and you can click on them and read the email when
you have multiple emails that arrive at sort of at around the same time you are
stuck with just a preview of both of them and you can't click further to read
the actual emails that is absolutely brutal I should be able to just tap to
see the whole thing not be stuck at the screen staring at a couple of different
subject lines the only complaint I really have physically then is that for
me it's just not very comfortable the clasp which contains the battery is
bulky enough to be uncomfortable when I'm typing and the wrist strap sizing
just didn't quite work well for me on the fourth hole it was floppy and all
over the place over the bones in my wrist but on the third hole it's a bit
tight and it also actually sits a little crooked on my wrist this would be less
of a concern if it was possible to readjust sizing through trial and error
but qualcomm's completely insane approach to sizing requires the user to
actually physically cut the non
replaceable strap to size so you got to
get it right the first time or it's going to be too small and I don't know
what you would do with it I mean I understand why the strap can't be
replaced there are actually buttons built into it above and below the watch
face that control the backlight and the main menu but honestly I don't really
like this implementation anyway the touch points are not clearly marked and
they're both small enough that I often miss them when casually reaching for
them while being big enough that I often hit them accidentally when I'm adjusting
the watch on my wrist or using the touchcreen but I could accept the
non-replaceable strap buttons If Qualcomm would at least let me configure
their functionality the backlight could easily be handled by the onboard
accelerometer with motion control like the pebble or even a sharp tap anywhere
on the device and menu could be handled by I don't know swiping in from a side
or the top or a a long user configurable
tap and hold or even left the way it is then I could bind those buttons to
something else or nothing at all just give me the option overall though it's a
really cool device and I genuinely want it to seed but the bad news is that the
software really needs some work which would be fine except that I'm just not
sure that I feel like they're focused on the right things right now 4 days before
filming this they added a half-hearted activity monitor to it presumably
because that's trendy right now but there are still other outstanding issues
that range from profoundly problematic like the fact that I can only preview my
emails rather than read them um all the way down to small things that are just
amusing like the way it puts an apostrophe and and a small o rather than
a zero in for the time on some of the watch faces and I'm just kind of sitting
there I'm going like quc come it's 2:00 but it's not 205 it made me feel like an
Irishman was reading the time to me whenever I was looking at my watch but
there is good news it could be worse at least the vast majority of my complaints
can be fixed through software updates they can as long as they go in the right
direction it's just that I feel like it's going to be hard to sell a a fixed
device when every revieww of it is based on the flawed earlier software revision
for qualcomm's own sake and for the sake of their early adopters I wish they had
refined this stuff first or at least been more competitive on the price at
$350 it's $100 more than a Pebble Steel
with its more mature app ecosystem um but it does at least offer a color
display so there's that it's more than a Galaxy gear which has abysmal battery
life this one doesn't I easily Got 5 days out of it but the gear does offer a
wider range of functionality with its camera speaker microphone Etc and
consider this at $350 these aren't really similar
products but I can't ignore that we're getting pretty close to just buying some
other luxury electronic toy like a PlayStation 4 or a 32 gig Nexus 5 I mean
this is a NextGen gaming system we're talking about or a full-fledged
smartphone with a 1080p display premium processor from Qualcomm no less wireless
charging the whole 9 yards overall I like the talk and I think it has
potential but in its current state if I've got a finite amount of money to
spend talk will have a hard time winning it from me guys thanks for watching my
Talk review like and share the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked
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