Full disclosure: I’ve only been using it for about 24hrs. I’ll write about it again in a week or so. And a after 30 days (when some of the stats kick in.)

Tl;dr version, it may be one of the best non-Pebble smart watches, with a caveat or two.

Pros:

• The auto brightness. I don’t know how well it work in bright sunlight yet. That will be the real test. It’s supposed to put out 1000 nits, so we’ll see.
• The touch interface is fast and responsive.
• Battery life. I’ve been playing around with it a lot, but I can tell I will get 4+ days out of it. So as advertised.

Cons:

• It’s a little pricey. Obviously this is what the market will bear.
• Setup. It will need to be updated first thing. Bluetooth will take too long. it was working out to taking 10hrs or so, for me but I never found out because the update kept failing. There is an option to use Wifi, but (and Apple devices are notorious for this despite the company going on about their security measures) it assumes you have medium security on your network. If you also use MAC addresses you have to resort to looking up “access denied ” entries in your router logs. So for me it was a 2 hr setup as opposed to 30 minutes.
•  Not nearly enough apps or watch faces. The majority were probably written for the ionic which didn’t do all that well, so maybe the Versa will sell better and result in more apps.

it’s called the comfort zone for a reason. i find i like to do things in my comfort zone. i’ve always been introverted and mostly shy so i kept to a lot of hobbies that didn’t require participation of anyone else.  i tend to excel when i do that because i don’t have to think about what people think or how well i’ll do.

lately i’ve done a number of things completely outside of my comfort zone. with varying success:

– i joined a book club at work.  my goal was to read outside of my favourite genre (science-fiction). but i was only the only one doing that, and it felt like a book club of one, so i haven’t really participated since i realized the issue.

– i played guitar in front of everyone at work. my guitar skills are intermediate at best and i’ve never been comfortable “in front of the class”. so it was a challenge. i wore sunglasses so nobody could see how terrified i was.

do i like doing things outside of my comfort zone? absolutely not. there is a degree of  fun and everyone is polite and non-judgemental,  i feel relieved when it’s done. the anticipation is alway worse before i start.

Will i do anything more outside of my comfort zone again? absolutely. i’ll whine to everyone about it, but i will try to do the best of my ability at the time… and i’ll still feel relieved when it’s done.

it’s called life. lots of things are great, lots of things suck dead bunnies loud, but you don’t know about the latter if you never try.

 

gah… can’t believe i just typed all that in and meant it.