Review: LG G Watch R

Note: The first review unit we received of the LG Watch had problems. After working with Google to identify what the problems were, I was sent a replacement watch that works as intended. I was finally able to test all of the watch's capabilities, and I've arrived at a new set of impressions based on my time testing a fully working unit, so we've updated the review to reflect this. If you want to read the updated version, it's here. This review you're looking at now is outdated. You should read the version based on the watch you can expect to get if you buy one today. We've left this old version up for the sake of transparency.

Despite being one of the first two Android Wear watches you could buy, LG didn’t really make much of a splash with the original G Watch. It was pretty bland-looking, particularly when compared to the beautiful round Moto 360. Now, LG is back with a round watch of its own.

The LG G Watch R, which, despite having too many individually separate letters in a single product name, is undeniably a massive improvement over the original G Watch. The only problem is that's actually not much of an achievement. The better way to measure its worth is to compare it to the current smartwatch it-girl, the Moto 360. Let’s start with looks.

Both watches are made of stainless steel, and both feel very solid. The 360 has a very thin bezel (which comes in silver or dark gray), whereas the G Watch R is thicker, and has some numbers permanently etched into the rim. This looks pretty good if you choose a watch face with analog hands, but it seems superfluous and out of place if you have a digital clock.

The G Watch R is a good deal heavier, coming in at 62 grams versus 43 on the Moto 360. That makes the watch 44 percent heavier, and it’s definitely a difference you can feel on your wrist. It feels more like a heavy-duty GPS-laden triathlon watch. The G Watch R’s body is 2.17 inches in diameter, versus 1.81 inches for the Moto 360. Technically, that makes the LG 20 percent bigger on your wrist, and yet, the 1.56 inch diameter screen on the Moto 360 is 20 percent bigger than the 1.3 inch LG. In other words, with the Moto 360 you get a fifth more screen size for a fifth less wrist real estate, which is good.

But displays are about more than just size. For starters, the Moto 360 has the infamous “flat tire” at the bottom of the screen. This is where the display drivers live, which is how Moto kept the bezel so thin. What this means, though, is that there’s a big dark chunk missing at the bottom of the Moto 360’s screen, and it’s hard to unnotice it. At the same time, I found that text was generally easier to read on the Moto 360, and that was really just because it has more width. The G Watch R also uses an OLED display vs IPS on the Moto. I found that the inky blacks on the G Watch R were generally more pleasing to the eye, and OLED typically uses less power as well.

Speaking of power, the G Watch R mops the floor with the Moto 360. It has a 410mAh battery—28 percent larger than the 320mAh on the Moto 360—and that difference shows. The Moto 360 generally makes it to the end of the day if you have it set to the mode where the screen is always on (called “ambient mode”). If you want to stretch it to 24 hours, you’ll have to turn ambient mode off and manually wake up the screen with a tap or a gesture. In contrast, the G Watch R generally makes it 40+ hours before it needs a charge, and that’s with ambient mode on! Having to charge it less is a big win.

Another clear win for the LG (at least on paper) lies in the horsepower. The Moto 360 runs a geriatric TI OMAP 3 processor that is not only slow, but is known to hemorrhage battery life. The G Watch R has the new 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 under the hood, which should make it extremely snappy. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Aside from that, they’re more alike than different. Both have 4GB of storage, both are water resistant (i.e., fine for the shower, but don’t go swimming), both have optical heart rate sensors, and neither have built-in GPS or standalone wireless connectivity. There’s some differentiation in the sensors. The Moto 360 has an ambient light sensor, so it can dim the screen when it’s dark. This is actually a pretty great feature. All other Android Wear watches require you to adjust the brightness manually, which can be extremely annoying (it’s buried in the menus). On the other hand, the G Watch R has a barometric altimeter, so it can display your elevation (along with a compass) on some of its custom watch faces. Theoretically, it could be used to track how many floors you climb in a day (Fitbit does this), but that hasn’t been integrated.

So that’s the technical stuff. What’s more important, though, is what it’s like to use them.

Despite the fact that both watches use leather bands, it feels as if the hide were cut from two very different animals. LG’s strap is extremely stiff. It feels like it was cut from some mythical Cardboard Beast. In contrast, the leather on the Moto 360 feels like it came off an angel’s butt. Combine that with its lightness and its smaller footprint, and the Moto 360 is unquestionably the more comfortable of the two.

While there’s no accounting for taste, I can’t imagine I’ll be in the minority when I say the Moto 360 is just far better looking. Yes, despite the flat tire and the less poppy screen, the design on the Moto 360 is just so nice. It’s extremely simple and yet it feels elegant. You could wear the Moto 360 with formal wear and it wouldn’t look out of place. In contrast, the G Watch R looks totally fine for walking around town or even business casual. It’s not bad-looking, but its size is a bit jarring, and it looks more at home in the outdoors.

Performance was the big surprise here. I expected the G Watch R to leave the Moto 360 in the dust, but that wasn’t the case. At least, not always. When the G Watch R is running smoothly it’s definitely quick, but the problem is that it often isn’t running smoothly. I’ve tested every Android Watch that’s presently available, and I’ve never had one crash on me anywhere nearly as often as the G Watch R. It has been completely freezing up on me, usually several times a day. It often seems to correct itself, eventually, which is good because even doing a hard reset (by long pressing the physical button on the right) doesn’t do it. A few times, it just froze on this rainbow static. I thought a ghost was trying to tell me something through a Magic Eye picture.

Brent Rose/WIRED

I also found the G Watch R had a noticeably less-sensitive screen. It would frequently miss swipes and presses, which is frustrating when the entire point of a smartwatch is that it’s supposed to be the quickest and least-painful way to deal with your various notifications. For all Android Wear watches, the way you dim out the screen is you cover it with your hand for a second. I’d often have to do this between two and four times with the G Watch R. This is partially because the screen is recessed into the bezel, so if you don’t squeeze enough of your hand-meat down into there, it doesn’t know it’s supposed to turn off.

While both watches have a heart rate monitor sensor built in, the Moto 360 records your heart rate data constantly throughout the day. It’s not always perfectly accurate, but it gives you a much more realistic estimate of your caloric burn compared to simple step-counting. The G Watch R requires you to fire up an app when you want to see what your ticker is doing. It’s not something you could use while running, or really, while doing anything.

The coup de grâce is that at $250, the Moto 360 is fifty bucks cheaper than the $300 G Watch R. Even if they were both $250 I’d have to go with the 360 here. The considerable performance and stability issues I regularly saw on the G Watch R make it a non-starter for now. I assume that it is just a bit of bad code running amok and that LG will probably fix it soon with a software update. But even so, the Moto 360 is just far more comfortable to wear, and it’s better looking. Add in the round-the-clock heart-rate monitoring and auto screen dimming, and it counter-balances the LG’s superior battery life, which seems to be its only meaningful advantage.

In short, the Moto 360 is the better watch and the better buy.