Gadgetory

time for a SmartWatch shoot out this is obviously the hottest category and technology right now samsung just announced the galaxy gear right before we shot this we didn't have one at press time but it sounds like it only works with samsung phones anyway so i'm testing some more Universal smartwatches the current darling of the set is the pebble right here comparing that with the Martian passport and trying to find out if either of those can displace my Michael Kors so I've been testing out the Martian passport smartwatch and I have to say that of all of the smart watches that I have seen or tried out this is obviously the prettiest I get tons of compliments whenever I wear this I got it in girly white although it does come in black but it's really attractive it has a very sort of classic timepiece style look up here and then a small little LED notification screen and notification light Paul Allison Tom calling Tom the pros overall for me are how easy it's notifications are basically any app that can do notifications you can get a little note down here so you can get incoming texts phone calls tweets Facebook messages emails now it's big claim to fame also is that it is a two-way communicator it actually uses voice control when you talk to it you're just talking to Siri or to the Android voice controls remind me to make a haircut appointment that's pretty awesome and I think it's a huge selling point generally speaking the whole thing is just pretty simple right like it just gives you notifications you can talk to it if you want to you can play music out of it I found it pretty easy to connect via bluetooth so that leads me into the cons of the Martian passport watch one thing I noticed with the Bluetooth connection is that its toll the Bluetooth connection from my car so if I was in the car and I had an incoming call or I wanted to use voice controls I was no longer going through the in car bluetooth system I only going through the watch one other con about this watch is that it's just a little bit finicky and some of the controls in the app or confusing for example i'm pretty sure i have it set to notify me when i get a text but sometimes it notifies me and sometimes it doesn't and i don't know really why it's decided not to or when it's going to that's annoying also i find that trying to check out the notifications and see what's happening on the watch is really distracting when you're driving like if this thing all of a sudden starts vibrating and things start happening on the screen and your got your hands on the wheel and then you're sort of trying to look at this and read it and then a notification is scrolling across it like this it's vibrating and things are ringing and I just I don't know what to do here I want out alright some impressions on the pebble watch here now I have to say that when I first tried it on I thought that it was a little cartoony probably because it had the Mario watch face up but then when I wear it with my orange shirt I realize it look kind of cool and then we went around the office trying it on different people and it looked cool on all of them too I think the design is a little bit of a slow burn but it really grew on me and now I really liked it especially because i found this kind of stylish watch face one of the cool things about this watch actually is that it has multiple watch faces built in that you can scroll through now overall i have definitely found this watch pretty easy to use it has a lot of buttons as you can see the ones on the side scroll through things and bring up basic menus and its really simple pairing is very easy and then the button on the left here acts as basically a home button to back out of menus and get you back to your watch face one thing I don't like is that the pebble unfortunately has a proprietary charging cable the Martian watch charges over microUSB so you can use it with any charger that you already have at home if you forget the charger on this guy you're in trouble so one interesting thing about the pebble watch is that apparently it's water-resistant now I have found over and over that water resistant does not mean waterproof however I'm hoping that it will give me a little peace of mind for basic tasks such as washing my hands in the sink you know you always get a little splash itude got a little soap on there get that off you know we got to do like the surgeon wash like all the way up to the elbows okay it seems fine so far I mean don't get me wrong I'm never gonna take a shower go swimming with this thing but I do appreciate that I can leave it on during my surgeon scrub what I do like about this big screen is that if a long email comes in I can press the buttons on the side and actually scroll through it so I can read the whole thing that has proven pretty handy a couple times I've also noticed that the Bluetooth range on this watch seems to be really good in fact it was working for me at one point 30 or 40 feet away from my actual phone whereas our reviewers have said that the Martian SmartWatch only works more like 10 or 12 feet away now the pebble because it has an SDK available has some apps I haven't tried too many of them because they are almost all for pay but from browsing the various apps in the App Store it does seem like they're somewhat limited as far as khan's go for this watch and the other in fact i found the notifications very inconsistent sometimes I couldn't get text messages to come through at all other times i would get only text and no email one other possible con is that this watch so far has been hard to get it only costs a hundred and fifty dollars which is a really good price compared to something like the Martian but because it's been a Kickstarter some of the fulfillments been a little bit slow hopefully they'll improve on that front but you might have to wait a while to get your pebble I have to say going into this I thought the Martian passport was going to be the clear winner because I liked the design so much but the pebble won me over with its simplicity and the potential for all that functionality not to mention this nice big screen however I'm gonna have to say that neither of these is actually a buy for me because I'm still not sold on smartwatches it's annoying I don't need that much info coming in all the time no thank you