Full Android on a smartwatch: ridiculous or awesome?

• Also see: Best Android smartwatches right now

How do full Android apps run and look on a niche, underpowered, round smartwatch?

As bad as you'd think! But it's still cool seeing the smartphone version of YouTube running on this tiny round display. With quite a bit of it cropped out, because the YouTube app has been designed with square-edged displays in mind, not a circular one.

So I open YouTube and type into the search bar… Wait a second, how do you type on this?



Well, this watch comes with a comically tiny keyboard preinstalled, that can switch between English and Chinese, and only has text prediction for the latter. And you can't disable the latter, nor did other keyboards I tried installing worked well enough. But in any case…

With some effort, I search for the PhoneArena YouTube channel and play a video. As expected, much of the video is cropped, but it does play just fine in terms of performance, and since the smartwatch has a (reasonably good!) speaker, I can hear it too.



What happens if I full screen the video? Well, it does go full screen with black borders, but the orientation jarringly changes, so that's not an ideal way for watching YouTube videos on your wrist either.

But okay, the Android YouTube app works reasonably fine, aside from the fact that it's not meant for round displays. And Spotify is a similar story. And Facebook. And Twitter. It's fun seeing their full Android versions open on a tiny round screen, but because of it, they're all almost completely unusable.

You can't reach any menu items in the top right or top left corners because they're cropped out, and sadly, that's exactly where most Android apps have them positioned.

No amount of compromises can make this good

What if you have photos or videos that you cherish and you wish to carry around with you at all times, even when your smartphone isn't with you? You put them on this smartwatch, right?

Well, photos are fine – they're small in size and the watch has a built-in file browser you can use to look at them, but videos… Those will work too, don't get me wrong, you could even install the VLC video player… if there was any available storage for all that jazz.

But no – full Android on this underpowered, round smartwatch is mostly unusable, sluggish, there's no storage for more than an app or two, and to top it all off – the battery life is almost comically terrible.

Even when it's doing nothing and it's turned off, this smartwatch's battery drains for whatever reason. I don't know if all my passwords are getting sent to a random location in the Guangzhou region of China or what, but if it drains when it's off, you can imagine how "good" it is when you're actually using it.

No joke, about one hour of usage is the best I can squeeze out of it, even with all of the battery saving trickery I know to try. And whether this is due to a small battery, or the fact that it has degraded from sitting in a damp factory somewhere for years, or simply because the full Android operating system isn't meant for this (that must be it!) – the bottom line is – don't get a no-name smartwatch running full Android.

Check out our list of the best smartwatches to get right now, which, of course, all run dedicated smartwatch operating systems instead. Ones that are designed for unique display shapes, and are lightweight enough to run snappy and last long between charges, even on a tiny battery.

But as for me – I don't really need an Apple Watch. What I love is to tinker with weird devices, see what those can do. And this one – it can do a lot, but badly, and for a very short period of time, before it flattens out and needs recharging. I don't regret trying it out, though, because of just how fun and ridiculous it is as a concept. The things that exist out there!