Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of CES 2014 is brought to you by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service along with Corsair memory and Western Digital we're here with the Qualcomm Talk SmartWatch is this something I'm actually pretty excited about and I've been trying to get my hands on one hopefully we're gonna make a full review happen soon but in the meantime this is my first time actually touching it and I'm pretty impressed with the overall fit and finish as you guys know I'm a bit of a pebble aficionado and if you're gonna try and convince me to spend double on one of these you're gonna have to give me something that has a better ID and more functionality so let's jump into the industrial design first it's got an adjustable band which is kind of a rubberized material it doesn't look like there's an obvious way to change it out and I suspect that's not going to be something you're gonna want to do because there are actually two touch sensitive buttons surfaces on the band itself so the top one double-clicking it will turn your backlight on or off and the bottom one acts as a back button as well as a way to switch between all of your sub menus or just your watch face now when you're on the standard watch face you can go ahead and swipe the bottom to switch between them I'm sure there will be customized ones coming later but the SDK for the talk isn't coming until early 2014 for the strap itself you just pop open the latch you can adjust it according to the size you need with the holes on the side and then you are pretty much ready to rock I mean it's a watch strap it's not that much to go wrong charging wise this is one of my complaints about the pebble and one of my complaints about a lot of mobile devices in general is cables there's microUSB which is fragile and then there's proprietary cables which are easy to lose and expensive to replace the talk does use a proprietary sort of charging dock solution that you go ahead and you stick it on but it's Wireless so at least it's convenient it lives somewhere it lives on your nightstand you get home you crawl into bed you put it on there and you're pretty much good to go to me wireless charging is sort of the holy grail of smart devices in terms of making them something that I'd be likely to actually use every day now let's walk through the functionality here so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna tap the bottom and we can see our comm hub which gives us notifications and gives us a log of everything that we have done on this phone pretty much now of course you don't have to go into the comm hub if you get a call or a text message or what else those will come up automatically as you get calls but of course this isn't synched to my phone at the moment calendar shows you everything that's going on today and tomorrow music can be used to control your mp3 player as long as it's you know built into a Bluetooth capable device it's not magic guys weather shows you the weather stalk show you the stock status is a cool one so you can see the connected phone as well as battery life you can turn your phone's rigueur on and off using your SmartWatch it is only Android right now but I've been I've overheard that there's talks about iOS but nothing concrete one way or the other you can also ping your phone by clicking on fine phone settings is pretty self-explanatory Bluetooth airplane mode as well as software update and finally your notifications so you can see any notifications whether it's from USA Today or whatever else that happens to be like I said the SDK is coming later guys so we can expect a lot more functionality here now the last thing and this is a big highlight of the device is the Mirasol display something I've never seen in person before now the e-ink display on the pebble is in my opinion one of the strongest things about that device because it enables for me about four days but they're saying for most people about seven days of battery life to me a watch has to be visible without a gesture where I lifted up to my face it has to always be visible now Mirasol takes fatty ink advantage of battery life and adds color and it also adds excellent performance I'd say probably even better just looking at it in direct sunlight maybe may be similar but you're getting color you're getting that long battery life and let's check this out it also takes a reflected light that comes from the space around you so when you're in a very bright environment it can be very difficult to read a digital display so you got the backlight for dark and then you've got the actual reflectiveness behind the screen to take care of that so we're gonna do what they're calling the talk challenge or something like that and we're gonna take our camera and b-roll here we're going to dial it in to read the talk Smart Watch correctly in direct sunlight then I'm gonna put my phone up next to it on maximum brightness and we're gonna see how they both look in direct sunlight one way or another guys I'm extremely excited to check this out and in a more in-depth sort of manner and I appreciate them being here at the show so we can check it out all right so thank you for checking out this video here at CES 2014 remember our trip to the show is powered by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service as well as Coursera memory Western Digital without them we wouldn't be able to be here bringing you guys this content