Vector Watch Review
Smartwatches right now are a wildly different experience depending on which brand you purchase. On one end, you have Android Wear, the Apple Watch and Samsung’s Gear line replicating most of the functionality of the phone the watch is connected to with voice actions, cellular support, and music storage on certain models. On the other end of the spectrum, there are devices like the Fossil Q54 Pilot, which is an analog watch with a vibration motor and notification light. The middle consists of the Pebble, which offers a colored screen, the ability to switch watch faces, but no music storage, limited voice actions and no cellular connectivity.
I prefer the middle of the spectrum. The four main things I use my watch for are to view notifications, control my music, as an alarm to wake me up, and to keep my phone unlocked when they are connected over Bluetooth. There’s some other features like custom watch faces I enjoy as well, but they aren’t necessary. For more complex things like voice actions or storing music, I prefer to just use my phone.
I’ve tried a couple Android Wear watches and as much as I liked them, I prefer the middle of the smartwatch spectrum. I still have my Pebble Steel from fall 2014, but the past few months haven’t been good to it. The battery life is beginning to shorten, and the watch has trouble connecting and staying connected with my phone (which only exacerbates the battery problem). A few months ago, I heard about the Vector Watch, a watch with a good design, limited feature set and best of all, the claims of a 30 day battery life. When the metric for great battery life is a week, 30 days seems impossible.
I’ve been using the Vector Watch since January 27th, connected to my Nexus 6P. This is the second watch I am on, with the first one losing a chunk of the screen within the first day I owned it. I purchased the black round Luna model with a matching stainless steel band, but switched it for a leather band soon after purchase. When I did try the steel watchband for a few days, I found it uncomfortable, with the metal links pulling on my arm hair and an imperfect size. The watch arrived with 66% battery life, and I fully charged it on January 31st.
One standout feature of the Vector Watch is the OS support: it has an official app for iOS, Android and even Windows Phone. I had no problems connecting the watch to my Nexus 6P, and even if I step out of Bluetooth range, the watch connects right away when I get back in range. First time setup was a breeze, and it didn’t take more than ten minutes to get the watch connected and updated. I used the watch primarily with my Nexus 6P since that’s my main phone, but it was just as good to use connecting to my Microsoft Lumia 640-there were no feature differences between OS’s.
Right off the bat I’ll go ahead and say the battery claims are 100% real. I don’t use the social streams or step tracking, so that’ll lessen my power use. I charged the watch to 100% on January 31st, and plugged it in again on February 29th. After 29 days of use, the watch had 20% battery life remaining, exceeding Vector’s estimate.
The display on the Luna model is completely round, with a little bit of bezel around it for other components. The watch isn’t overly thick, and looks completely in place on my wrist. One thing I’ve noticed during my time with the watch is no one I work or hang out with thought it was anything more than a traditional watch. When I had my Pebble, it looked different enough from a traditional watch to warrant some kind of response, but the Vector is stylish enough to look normal to most eyes. Whether this matters to you or not is up to your personal taste.
Unfortunately some of the style is ruined by the screen itself. There doesn’t seem to be any anti-fingerprint coating, so the screen gets greasy very easily even though it doesn’t have a touch screen. As mentioned above, the first model I had lost a chuck out of the front glass, even though I didn’t hit it against anything. Fortunately, the replacement has held up against accidental bangs. The metal hasn’t scratched at all in the few weeks I’ve had the watch.
Notifications come in reliably, though I do wish the vibration motor was a little stronger. When a notification comes in, the watch will vibrate. The notification won’t display though. There is a ring around the watch face, and lifting the watch to your face will display the notification. I was skeptical of this set up at first, but it works around 90% of the time for me. Other systems have promised similar actions, but this is the only one to consistently work. If you don’t get a chance to view the notification within a few seconds, the ring will remain around the watch face. You can then access your notifications by pressing the middle button on the right of the watch.
Music controls were not included when my first watch arrived, but were added during an update between sending my first watch back and the replacement arriving. The layout is simple, with volume up, play/pause, and volume down options for the top, middle and bottom buttons respectively. Hold down the buttons will let you will go to the next track, take you back to the main app screen and reverse track respectively. I would have preferred if skipping/reversing the tracks was the default option or better yet, if the user could choose the default option. Despite my grumbles, the controls work well.
The alarms section reminds me that there are still growing pains with this watch. Setting a new alarm means grabbing a digital watch hand, and dragging it around a circle to select the time you want the alarm to go off. This makes it easy to quickly change the hour, but selecting an exact minute is frustrating.
More over, there is no option to have the alarm recur on a set basis: you set an alarm and it will go off once before becoming inactive. Fortunately, you don’t need to reset the time every day, you just need to turn the alarm on. Going forward, I hope Vector revamps the interface for adding an alarm, and add a recurrence option.
Installing or deleting watch faces and apps is as easy as going to the Store within the app. There are three types of content: faces (self explanatory) streams, and apps. There have been some third party watch faces added recently, but even Vector’s options all look stylish. Streams include information like stocks, weather, a step counter, and Facebook and Twitter information that can be placed onto compatible watch faces. The amount of information depends on the stream selected; for instance, the Facebook stream only shows the amount of likes and comments from your last post.
Apps include the aforementioned music controls, Evernote, Nest, an Activity face, news publications and functions like Alarm and Timer. Apps are essentially their own watch face, with the side button used for the apps functionality. Also, you do not need to have the Alarms app installed in order to have an alarm set, the app allows you to set or edit an alarm from the watch itself rather than the Vector phone app. Setting an alarm on the watch is even more frustrating than inside the app, as you have to hold the top and bottom buttons in order to change the alarm time one minute at a time.
The Vector Watch also offers sleep and step tracking as well. Sleep tracking seems accurate enough, logging my average 7 hours and 45 minutes of sleep per night. My steps seem accurate as well, and you can’t just shake the watch to cheat and register more steps. There’s also calorie and distance tracking, but I haven’t bothered to fill out the requisite information.
Vector’s website offers their round Luna and square Meridian watches in a number of colors and band options. If you don’t like the watch bands included, both bands work with any 22 millimeter watch band. I purchased my watch for $329 on Amazon, and while there are some growing pains, I’m very happy with my purchase. The watch doesn’t attempt to duplicate every feature of my phone, it looks like any traditional watch, and the 30 day battery life is completely real. I hope Vector fixes my few minor complaints, but other than those I can’t recommend this watch enough.
