My Smartwatch decision is…

Well, after a couple of weeks with an Asus ZenWatch 2, I’ll say I was pleasantly surprised with it overall. I haven’t been wearing a watch for a while now; in fact, I wore my watch a few weeks ago and when I went to check the time at work that day, the battery was dead! Needless to say it had been a while.

Over the time with the ZenWatch 2, I’m not sure exactly what the reason was, but I was drawn to putting the watch on every morning, including it in my daily routine.

Here’s a snapshot, informal review and final decision on the Asus ZenWatch 2, but also the idea of the smartwatch from my perspective.

The watch didn’t look like a big clunker on my wrist, nor did it really look like a smartwatch at all. It fit well on my wrist and wasn’t noticeably heavier than a regular watch at all. This watch did have quite the bezel on it, but with a black watch face chosen, it really didn’t stand out all that much until I actually started using it for more than a watch.

The concept itself was quite interesting, to be able to get your notifications sent directly to your wrist, rather than having to pull your phone out to check them. This part I liked; getting weather updates, reminders of my calendar events, even photos sent through text messages was very neat.

Some nice features of the watch that I liked were that you could turn off notifications and the sneak peek mode, keeping the watch as a watch so if I was in a meeting, it wouldn’t keep lighting up. The wrist gestures were kind of neat that you could move your wrist to navigate pages on the watch, which would come in handy if you were say biking or driving and didn’t have both hands available.

I don’t really have anything bad at all to say about the Asus ZenWatch 2. As reviewed, it performs really well and for the price, it is a great entry point for those looking to get into the smartwatch scene, without having to break the bank.

The part I couldn’t get used to was having to speak to my wrist to say for example reply to a text message. If I really needed to reply to someone’s text or ask Google something, I could just pull out my phone to do that.

Maybe this just isn’t my time for the smartwatch, or maybe it was this watch in particular that I wasn’t crazy about in terms of looks (square face vs. round), but I’m sure at some point I’ll revisit this again in the future. But for now, I’ll keep my regular watch that I’ll need to get a new battery for, and forego the smartwatch at this moment in time.