LG Watch Sport Review: The Best Standalone Fitness Watch? (Video)
Doesn’t Need Your Phone
The fact it has LTE built in gives it some interesting features, too. If you sign up for the plan from your carrier (either AT&T or Verizon at the moment), it’ll cost about $10 a month and allow your watch to use data from your plan directly instead of having to get the data via Bluetooth from the paired phone. In addition to the data usage though, the watch also gets its own phone number which is then forwarded to by your actual phone’s number. This means that technically, you could, say, go for a run and leave the phone at home and still be able to get your texts and phone calls made to your original number on the watch as if it was your phone.
Now, I personally don’t really think I’d need this feature very often as, let’s be real, how often do I ever not have my phone within arm’s reach at all times. I do see, though, how in the working out or going for a quick run scenario it might be useful. So that’s up to you.
I also did have some odd things happen because of the LTE connection, too. For example, if the watch ever dies or you turn it off for an extended period of time, fully expect a barrage of notifications when you turn it back on. It apparently doesn’t actually sync with the other number and know which things were already read, so it just pings you about everything that happened while it wasn’t on. This might be something that gets fixed with an update though, but in the meantime, it can get a little annoying for the odd times that it happens.
Speaking of that run you might go on with the watch, it also has the ability to have music downloaded to that 4GBs of internal storage it has through the Google Play Music app. You simply download the Music app on the watch and any music you’ve added to your library (either by purchasing from the Play Music store or you’ve uploaded to Play Music from your own collection) is available in the app for download. Then you can pair a Bluetooth headset to the watch itself and use it to play music or, if so inclined, play the music directly on the watch’s speaker.
A new feature of Android Wear 2.0 also is that it allows you to not have to download the music, as it’ll allow you to stream the music from Play Music or even Spotify/Pandora/etc. Unfortunately, though, I haven’t had any luck with getting that to work on Spotify or Pandora or any other app besides the Play Music app but since Play Music just seems to have appeared in the Wear app store a few days after I’d already been using the watch wondering where it was, I assume it might be waiting on a new app or firmware update to get streaming from other apps working on the watch.
The LG Watch Sport also happens to be IP68 certified which means it can handle being dunked down to a meter of water for a maximum of 30 minutes. While this isn’t Apple Watch swimming commercial territory, it does mean it’ll handle sweat, rain, snow, an accidentally dip in a liquid, etc. and definitely helps with the concept of it being meant to be used for sports.
