Hands On With LG's Hybrid-Mechanical Watch W7

The wildest smartwatch I've seen this year, the LG Watch W7 runs for three months on a charge as a mechanical watch. Light it up, though, and it becomes a full Wear OS smartwatch with the UI under the mechanical hands.

It's tremendously ambitious, but the mechanical hands and the Wear OS interface have a tendency to clash. I got some time with it at LG's Wednesday launch event.

The Watch W7 isn't huge for an Android watch—it's big, to be sure, but felt about the same size as the Samsung Galaxy Watch ($329.99 at Samsung) . Android watches are just big. There are two buttons and a turnable crown on the right hand side, and the bands are removable.

The basic "watch only" mode has a black screen, with mechanical hands pointing to numbers inscribed around the edge of the phone.

The mechnical hands integrate well with digital watch faces; I really liked one face with time rings that were closed to the point where the hands were. It's a really cool fusion of the physical and the digital.

They play along with certain other applications, too. A set of core "master tools"—a compass, stopwatch, barometer, altimeter, and timer—use the hands, with the hands pointing to magnetic north or counting down the timer. Those tools seem to exist in a low-power middle ground between the screen-off mode and full Wear OS.

But the deeper you get into Wear OS notifications, the less customized it is, and as a result the mechanical hands and the Wear OS interface start to clash. Scrolling and tapping on the touch screen is surprisingly smooth, with no parallax issues, given how deep the display is in the body.

But the hands will frequently cover words on the screen, or cover things like text-message quick replies that you might want to tap. Pressing the top-right button moves the hands to 9:15, which makes the display more readable, but that feels like a kludge.

In full Android Wear mode, it only runs for two days on a charge. And for $450, you aren't getting a lot of flagship smartwatch features—there's no heart rate monitor, GPS, or LTE. At least it's IP68 waterproof.

The W7 comes out on Oct. 14 for around $450. That's a lot for an Android Wear smartwatch, but most of them don't have the mechanical element.

LG has been committed to Google's Wear OS smartwatch OS for years, but Google-powered smartwatches haven't taken off in the US. IDC's global smartwatch tracker has Apple, Xiaomi, Fitbit, Huawei, and Garmin as the top five players, but points out that Huawei (the only Google OS player in the mix) has "been heavily focused on the Chinese market."

1-Cool-Thing_Apple-Watch-4-mp4-1537803065341.mp4