The Sony Smartwatch 3, My Review…

My prior smartwatch, Sony Smartwatch 2, had some irreparable “dead pixel” issues and it went dark somewhere in the middle. I liked the battery life of my Sony Smartwatch 2 that I decided to procure its newest version, the Sony Smartwatch 3 with the metallic silver wristband.

The Sony Smartwatch 3 with the metallic silver wristband. It boasts of the following features: WIFI, NFC, GPS, Compass, Accelerometer, and Gyro. It has voice, touch, and gesture input. It has a 420ma battery and about 2GB of storage memory. 

Sony Smartwatch 3 is quite heavier compared to its predecessor, Sony Smartwatch 2. The screen design looks very similar to my Samsung Gear 2 Neo.

Sony Smartwatch 3 is larger than the Sony Smartwatch 2 and has a larger screen. The bezel size on the side didn’t change much. Unlike the Sony Smartwatch 2 which uses a Sony proprietary operating system, Sony Smartwatch 3 is now on Android Wear.

This is my Samsung Gear 2 Neo. The screen size of Sony Smartwatch 3 is very much like the design of Samsung Gear 2 Neo. However, the Sony Smartwatches have an ambient mode where you can still “read” their clockface even without a backlight (like the Pebble watch). Samsung Gear 2 Neo doesn’t have the ambient feature and you have to turn on the back light to view its screen.

This was how the built-in clock face of my old Sony Smartwatch 2 looked like before the middle pixels went dead after three years of use. There’s not much clock face out in the market for Sony Smartwatch 2 and most of these clock faces can run the battery dry in less than 2 days.

This is how a built-in clockface of Sony Smartwatch 3 looks like… and there’s more. In addition, you could also find hundreds of free and paid clock faces in Google Play Store. And using the Android Watchmaker, you can actually build your own clock face from scratch.

Now my verdict…

The Cons… The battery life of Sony Smartwatch 3 is lesser than its predecessor. My old Sony Smartwatch 2 can run for 4 to 5 days in between charging. Sony Smartwatch 3 is only good for 2 days with a maximum of 3 days of normal use (with the tilt wake off). Compared to Smartwatch 2 where you can change its wristband using any 24mm straps, you need an “adapter” to change Smartwatch 3’s wristband.

The Pros… The availability of hundreds of clock faces and applications for the Android Wear is awesome. And since it is using an Android operating system, Smartwatch 3’s connection and notification features with my Android device is superbly seamless. Of course, the screen size does matter. Smartwatch 3 has a larger screen size which makes reading easier compared to the Smartwatch 2.

In short, the Pros outweighs the Cons in Smartwatch 3. I am very happy with my new Smartwatch 3! 🙂