A smartwatch with unrivalled design and battery life but an entirely absent eco-system.
It’s high time somebody disrupted the narrative of the Silicon Valley disruptor. Still a nascent product category, smartwatches have so far been dominated by internet giants, laptop manufacturers and venture-backed Kickstarter darlings; meanwhile, all those staid watch companies from Casio to Rolex haven’t had a look in.
Frankly, it’s getting a little tedious, so it’s refreshing to see a company like Vector come along and put the hackers back in their place. It’s staffed with veterans from watch companies including Timex and Fossil, and its first product, the Luna smartwatch, stole the show at the Baselworld watch convention earlier this year, thanks to its classic design and an emphasis on something Google, Apple, Sony et all seem to have completely forgotten about: battery life. On paper, the £219 Luna should royally trounce these Young Turks. In practice, you soon find yourself wondering if some of those sunkissed California brogrammers slurping on soylent slushies and killing it wouldn’t mind throwing some of their knowledge Vector’s way nonetheless, because everything really does need apps.
Design & Build
As you might expect from companies better used to making web browsers or TV screens, the design of most smartwatches we’ve seen so far has been perfunctory at best. Even the pricey Apple Watch looks like a Casio calculator watch with no clothes on. Not the Luna though; this is a watch first and foremost, one blessed with a natural intelligence, not a Bluetooth enabled device with a leather strap bolted on as an afterthought.
We tested the metal, circular edition of the Luna (a more subtle square model is on the way), and quite honestly it’s in a class of its own. It’s chunky, like an LG G Watch R, but with none of the childish Baby-G stylings. A classy strap connects up to a 11mm thick smooth circular disc which curves up to a completely circular display, albeit inset by a thick black bezel. It’s very simple, and elegant as a result, something no other smartwatch manufacturer has managed yet. It makes the Pebble Time, its foremost rival since it too works with Android and iOS, look like a toy from a cereal packet.
That said, unlike the Time, the Luna lacks a colour screen. Instead, it sports a low-res black and white display to show you the time and notifications; it’s perfectly visible even in broad sunlight – notifications appear as a thick white line around the clock face and you can either tilt to look at the them or press the central button on the side. Importantly, the display is not a touchscreen: you simply control notifications and watch faces from the buttons on the side. This also has the benefit of preserving battery life, which is useful when the monochrome screen is always on, you know, like a real watch rather than most smartwatches, which require a comical flick of the wrist to activate.
Let’s talk about that battery life, since it’s the Luna’s true USP despite the handsome exterior. The Luna absolutely lives up to Vector’s claims of one month battery life, even with the display on 24 hours and notifications constantly pouring in. (It’s worth noting that you can only view battery life through the app on your phone; in practice this isn’t an issue since you only have to remember to charge it up on your nightstand once every three weeks or so using the charger that bolts onto the back of the face.) If you’re after a smartwatch but worried about how much charge it’ll hold after a year of use (something we’re yet to learn about the Apple Watch), then this should bump the Luna right up to the top of your shopping list.
Software
To emphasise its unique position, Vector has built its own custom operating system for the Luna, which is in some ways inspired, and in others utterly lacking. It’s fast and reliable, but crucially the Luna is not for interacting with your phone from your wrist – there’s no music track controls yet, and you can’t even answer a call from it, only send it to answerphone.
Instead, the Luna is about showing you what’s upcoming. After quickly pairing via Bluetooth, you can see on ‘analog’ watch faces what hours you have events in your calendar that day, as well as who emails and messages are from (once you clear these away with a button press, they’re gone from your watch for good).
You can pick your watch face from the perfunctory smartphone app, which shows things like steps versus your goals, distance covered (which seems fairly accurate, though the sleep quality gauge is utterly meaningless) and lets you set multiple alarms, with the promise of more designs to come. You can choose digital watch faces too, but you’ll want to pick one which has space for the Luna’s best software feature: streams. These are simply lines of data, but they’re always up to date and always on show, so you can see different world time zones of your choosing, your live step count or even stock prices. These are actually incredibly subtle, personal and convenient, and an innovation we hope others steal – there are actually very, very few devices that show your live step count at all times, with no button press required.
Notifications on the other hand are a complex beast. Actually, on the Luna they’re just a bit of a mess. A quiet vibration alerts you to anything incoming, but because they’re simply pulled from whatever your smartphone spits out, they vary wildly. On Android, for instance, Google Talk messages appear with the first lines of a message (handy), but emails often appear with only the sender’s name, and not even a subject line. The same is true for WhatsApp conversations. When that happens, you find yourself just opening your phone anyway.
There’s no simple way to tailor notifications on what emails make it through to your wrist either – you’ll have to play around with your email app of choice to see what works. This does at least mean you can customise to your heart’s content – there’s a lot you can do if you know your way around apps like If This Then That or Tasker – but for smartwatch novices, it’ll be a daunting, uphill process.
In fact, that’s the Luna’s biggest drawback, not the design, not even the price: the question mark hovering over it is third party support in future. This is uncharted territory for Vector, and it’s still finding its way, figuring out which Android, Apple and Windows Phone apps push what to wearables (the company has yet to find a reliable way to push Google Maps directions, for instance). It’s barely even started on getting third party developers involved: there are a few ‘apps’ which are just news tickers from sites like BBC News and Cnet, but they’re all from Vector itself.
There’s no existing eco-system, which presents a real risk to potential purchasers, when Pebble has managed to get so many developers and services on board with its platform. You need to be willing to gamble with the Luna: you could be getting the ultimate smartwatch, but it also might never become more than what it is now, an early warning system for all of your emails.
One thing we’re as sure of though, so certain you could set your watch by it: a Vector watch with Pebble’s app support would be a force to reckon with Apple and Google.
Verdict
An ambitious attempt to inject some much-needed class into the smartwatch. It’s beautiful. But the level of interactivity is minimal and its software lacking. Ultimately, we came away wondering what a Pebble Time with Vector’s hardware and battery life might be like. We can only hope this becomes just that, but the company has a long road to travel first.
Spec sheet
Os Custom
Storage No
MicrosD compatible? No
Samera No
Video No
Connectivity Bluetooth LE
Dimensions 44 x 44 x 11mm
Weight 142g
Battery 30 days