Gadgetory

to open up my review of the qualcomm talk smart watch guys please the pronunciation is talk like tick tock not tok at least until they release a Bob Marley edition the number of people who have said that to me the Coolermaster Glaser 240 L CPU cooler delivers the convenience of an all-in-one and the performance of a custom water cooler click now to learn more all right so front and center on the talk is the 1.5 5-inch Mirasol display with a responsive accurate glass touchscreen that was much more difficult to scratch them the plastic one on my pebble the main selling points of Mirasol are its power efficiency its visibility and direct sunlight and the fact that it's color rather than monochrome all in all it is an exceptional technology and I'm very excited to see next generation ear eaters and other smart devices that use it I do think Qualcomm marketing materials have oversold it a bit though they're working on refining it but for now the colors while present are not nearly as vibrant as the promotional videos would have you believe now when it comes to performance Qualcomm isn't really talking about the hardware inside but booting it up is fast navigation is snappy so I guess I don't really care what processor is inside or how much RAM it has more important to me is power efficiency and I got similar battery life on my talk as I did on my pebble with its black and white display so you can color me impressed there pun intended my only issue with the battery life is that I really don't know how it would compare if the backlight behaved the way that I want it to among the glaring omissions in cual comes companion Android app is any kind of meaningful backlight behavior adjustment you can set the double tap speed and the timeout time but brightness control is missing as is accelerometer based activation like the pebbles wrist flick and there's also no option to have the backlight illuminate automatically when a notification is received instead if it's dark out I actually have to manually turn on the backlight it might seem like a minor complaint but if you consider how prominently the always on nature of the display so you can glance at your wrist and see what's on it at any time featured in Qualcomm's marketing it's obvious that they understand the importance of not needing to touch it or do some contrived gesture in order to read it so hopefully that'll be added soon so let's talk everyday use the included wireless charging dock unfolds like that is a big plus it uses Y power le which boasts support for multiple devices at the same time and with a larger charging field compared to Chi the clock flips 90 degrees making it easy to read on your bedside table and honestly the only thing missing here is again a backlight thing is the option to keep the backlight on when it's charging so it can completely replace the clock on my nightstand the fact that it's waterproof is also great I actually didn't know that yet when I was giving the baby a bath one night and I realized I was wearing it so panic moment there but to my relief it is indeed waterproof it's also definitely a head turner I get a lot of people asking me about it which is fun for techno files with the pebble people are like heck is that whereas with this people are like oh that's cool what is that and I mean as much as that might have something to do with my pebble being bright orange either way you know I gotta give credit where credit is due people liked it they asked about it and it's fun the vibrate is both easy to feel and not unnecessarily loud as I said before it's very responsive which leads us to the main menu each icon on the main screen represents an applet which is their name for an app there aren't really many available but what is their works pretty well there's weather stock checking message log call history and of course music control which I used a lot navigation is super intuitive just swipe from the sides when you want to go back or forward and I really liked being able to go back into my notification history much more easily than with my pebble where things just kind of seemed to disappear there is one thing I noticed that must be a bug though individual emails show up and you can click on them and read the email when you have multiple emails that arrived at sort of around the same time you are stuck with just a preview of both of them and you can't click further to read the actual emails that is absolutely brutal I should be able to just tap to see the whole thing not be stuck at this screen staring at a couple of different subject lines the only complaint I really have physically then is that for me it's just not very comfortable the clasp which contains the battery is bulky enough to be uncomfortable when I'm typing and the wrist strap sizing just didn't quite work well for me on the fourth hole it was floppy and all over the place over the bones in my wrist but on the third hole it's a bit tight and also actually sits a little crooked on my wrist this would be less of a concern if it was possible to readjust sizing through trial and error but Qualcomm is completely insane approach to sizing requires the user to actually physically cut the non-replaceable strap to size so you got to get it right the first time or it's going to be too small and I don't know what you would do with it I mean I understand why the strap can't be replaced there are actually buttons built into it above and below the watch face that controlled the backlight and the main menu but honestly I don't really like this implementation anyway the touch points are not clearly marked and they're both small enough that I often miss them when casually reaching for them while being big enough that I often hit them accidentally when I'm adjusting the watch on my wrist or using the touch screen but I could accept the non-replaceable strap buttons if Paul comm would at least let me configure their functionality the backlight could easily be handled by the onboard accelerometer with motion control like the pebble or even a sharp tap anywhere on the device and then you could be handled by I don't know swiping in from a side or the top or a long user configurable tap and hold or even left the way it is then I could bind those buttons to something else or nothing at all just give me the option overall though it's a really cool device and I genuinely want it to succeed but the bad news is that the software really needs some work which would be fine except that I'm just not sure that I feel like they're focused on the right things right now four days before filming this they added a half-hearted activity monitor to it presumably because that's trendy right now but there are still other outstanding issues that range from profoundly problematic like the fact that I can only preview my emails rather than read them all the way down to small things that are just amusing like the way it puts an apostrophe ending on a small o rather than a zero in for the time on some of the watch faces and I'm just kind of sitting there more like Qualcomm it's 2 o clock but it's not 2:05 it made me feel like an Irishman was reading the time to me whenever I was looking at my watch but there is good news it could be worse at least the vast majority of my complaints can be fixed through software updates they can as long as they go in the right direction it's just that I feel like it's going to be hard to sell a fixed device when every review of it is based on the flawed earlier software revision for Qualcomm zones sake and for the sake of their early adopters I wish they had refined this stuff first or at least been more competitive on the price at three hundred and fifty dollars it's $100 more than a pebble steel with it's more mature app ecosystem but it does at least offer a color display so there's that it's more than a galaxy gear which has abysmal battery life this one doesn't I easily got five days out of it but gear does offer a wider range of functionality with its camera speaker microphone etc and consider this at three hundred and fifty dollars these aren't really similar products but I can't ignore that we're getting pretty close to just buying some other luxury electronic toy like a PlayStation 4 or a 32 gig Nexus 5 I mean this is a next-gen gaming system we're talking about or a full-fledged smartphone with a 1080p display premium processor from Qualcomm no less wireless charging the whole nine yards overall I like the talk and I think it has potential but in its current state if I've got a finite amount of money to spend talk will have a hard time winning it from me guys thanks for watching my talk review like and share the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it I promise not to suffer an emotional collapse if you dislike my video and leave a comment either here or in the Linus tech tips forum linked in the video description if you discuss this product with other viewers 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