Sony LiveView Touch Generation 2 SmartWatch Android Smartphone Accessory

What I liked:
- The discrete nature of staying connected without having to rely on checking the Android phone - great at work.
- Feels good quality, comfortable, the design itself is second to none, and it certainly grabs attention.
- Touchscreen works like a dream and is very responsive.
- It functions fairly well as a remote access point for your android phone (although this is ALL it does).
- Good battery life (but it takes longer to charge than my phone).
- Really useful and comes into its own when driving.
- For what it is and what it does it is good value.
- Initial set up is very easy.

What I disliked:
- Android is supposed to be an open source OS which relies heavily on 3rd party apps; the music app and mail app do not function correctly unless you are using the default Sony apps, which somewhat defies the point.
- Blutooth needs to be always on for the watch to work; the Blutooth connection isn't always reliable.
- The screen is responsive but difficult to read, suffers with glare, you often find yourself having to partially cover the screen with your hand to read it.
- The watch face is rather thick, it is set into the strap, but it means it takes more knocks (although its well built to stand up to it).
- If your phone is too far away or not connected, the watch stops working completely. It does not function in its own right.

Overall:
It isn't a watch so much as it is a remote access point for your Android phone which sits on your wrist, that is ALL it is designed to be, so don't expect anything more than that; it does that fairly well though but with a few obvious flaws. The watch is a 2nd Gen. model so it's a shame Sony hasn't yet ironed out any of these issues. It also somewhat defies the point of using an Android OS, since it relies heavily on default apps to function correctly. I would recommend it, although it's a far cry from perfect.

I've had my SmartWatch for just over 2 weeks now, and while I am still happy with my purchase, there are a few things to bear in mind if you are considering buying this watch.

1. It requires a constant bluetooth connection to an Android phone to do anything - it won't even display the time if you have not connected it at least once after powering it on.
2. The device itself is essentially an extra, remote screen for your Android device - although it may appear that way, the various SmartWatch apps available on Google Play do NOT run on the device itself, instead they run on the phone and their output is sent to the watch. This means that any apps you have downloaded for the watch will be constantly running in the background on your phone. So, if you have an older Android device with not a lot of memory, this could be a big problem and cause your phone to slow up considerably. I have an Xperia Arc which has 512 MB RAM, and I would say that is about the minimum spec of phone you should try using with this watch. I need to turn off my bluetooth connection (which automatically shuts down the SmartWatch apps) when using memory intensive apps/games on my phone or performance will be affected.
3. The bluetooth connection requires 2 apps to be installed on your phone, LiveWare Manager and the SmartWatch app. The bluetooth connection is however still not perfect, and drops out from time to time. This is improving with new LiveWare releases, and I understand it's MUCH more reliable than the old LiveView connection, but it's still not perfect.
4. The music player widget will not show the album art and track name (as shown in the pictures here) unless you have a Sony phone and are using the stock Sony music app. The controls still work for other players (like PowerAmp).
5. The email widget also only works if you have a Sony phone and are using the stock Sony email app on your phone (which I fortunately am), otherwise the best you can do is get one of the SmartWatch notification apps from Google Play to send email (and other) notifications to your watch. Unfortunately, these notification apps do not allow you to read the text of emails on your watch (unlike the email widget) and also require an accessibility service running in the background constantly on your phone, which can take up quite a bit of memory.
6. The screen is not good in bright, direct sunlight. Unfortunately, there isn't a way (yet) to adjust the screen backlight brightness.

Otherwise, the SmartWatch has worked very well for me. It's just about right size-wise, battery life is ok (given its OLED screen) and it responds well to touch gestures like swiping and pinching.

The Motorola Motoactv may well be a MUCH more powerful Android SmartWatch (which you can also root and run Angry Birds on!) but it is also over twice the price of the Sony watch, which probably offers pretty much all the functionality you'll be looking for in a SmartWatch anyway. As long as you can live with the points mentioned above.

So I went and bought the latest smart watch (brought the MK1 live view previously), must say its seems very good so far, picks up sms's from my 3rd party sms client (live view didn't), bluetooth connection is faultless so far, even when you go out of range (the watch vibrates a couple of times to signify it has disconnected)when you come back into range the connection picks up again without issue (My samsung GS2 has BT 3.0 which probably helps), and the battery life seems pretty reasonable too, so far 4 days since initial charge, and that's including lots of tinkering (although I don't bother with FB and twitter updates so that probably helps).

Generally the quality of the watch is much better (splash proof as well) including the bundled wrist band.

Firmware is updated via bluetooth now as opposed to plugged in via usb.

The only negative remarks are that it uses a proprietary connection for charging which is a pain to have to carry the cable with you to work etc, and my standard email client (from samsung) doesn't show up any notifications on the watch, hopefully that will be sorted in time?

The touch screen / refresh isn't as responsive as you might expect (dues to app data being stored and executed on the phone and then transferred to the watch), so there's a bit of lag, but its not a deal breaker.