Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “A Montblanc Smartwatch (Not A Google One): Wear OS 3 on the Summit 3”.
It’S the smartwatch reboot we androids have been awaiting since 2017, when a combination of confusing software and underwhelming hardware kicked off a dark age that saw google’s, wear os platform, lose mind and market share to competitors like garmin and apple well. After launching nearly a year ago, with a heavily modified look and feel on the galaxy watch, we finally get to see what google’s wear os 3 looks like without all that samsung software skin, and we get to see it on a time piece from one of the World’S top luxury brands – i’m michael fisher – and this is a first look at wear os three on the montblanc summit 3.. To give you an idea of how excited i was to see the new wear os, i couldn’t even wait to leave the lobby of montblanc’s building before unboxing the watch upon which it was running. Now, if you don’t know mom mumblang for its mechanical watches or its pens or more recently its travel headphones, you might remember it from my review of the summit. 2 back in 2018..
I like that watch. The summit 3 is a luxury item, with a capital l with a price tag of twelve hundred ninety dollars, most of which, let’s be honest, is just for the name. It is well packaged, though, inside the big box is a thank you letter, a plush pillow, to give the piece, the proper presentation and little drawers for your documentation and accessories, which include both leather and rubber watch bands with standard 22, millimeter connectors and also a charging Cradle that lets the watch lie down or stand up. The summit 3 supports fast pairing.
So when you turn it on your phone automatically wakes up and asks you to download an app, not the wear, os app you might be familiar with, but instead a custom title from montplunk itself, yeah with wear os 3. Each manufacturer makes its own app for android and ios. I was surprised by this, but when you think about it, it kind of makes sense. It gives brands more control over the out-of-box experience, and indeed this minimal monochromatic interface complements the summit 3 perfectly, providing a much more cohesive, onboarding process.
It also lets montblanc provide perks to summit buyers. The company plans to push an exclusive new watch face every two months as well as some other goodies. It wasn’t ready to tell me about yet the setup feels smoother than on the wear os of yesteryear, with only one sign-in required and a tutorial that teaches you.
How to use the revamped interface, much of which is, thankfully, the same. You swipe up from the bottom to see your notifications swipe down from the top for system shortcuts, like do not disturb brightness and find my phone and your widgets or tiles, now extend both to the right and left of the watch face. There is more emphasis on recent applications now so much so that the two o’clock pusher has been dedicated to task switching press it once for your recent apps list and double-click it to jump quickly between the two apps you last used double-clicking.
The crown takes you straight into google pay clicking. It once opens up your app list and, yes, that crown is still active, so you can spin it to scroll through lists or read long messages. Finally, beneath that the four o’clock pusher defaults to fitness tracking out of the box, but you can set it to launch any app you want. Even after months on my garmin mark captain, i found it pretty easy to slide back into the wear os experience. Those tiles put my calendar, the weather and top level health metrics within a few swipes of the watch face. Speaking of the watch face, the watch came preloaded with about 20 of them and, of course, you can also replace those with custom faces from the play store or something like facer.
As notifications come in the watch vibrates, albeit not with as much force as i would like, and now there’s a little flourish to the notifications. The screen will first show a large icon, for whichever app is sending the notification before then showing you the message itself. If you’ve used samsung smart watches, this will be familiar.
I used to call it slow by design and i’m still not sure i like it, but at least it’s a little faster now, in fact, with a gig of ram backing up the 4100 plus silicon. The whole thing feels fast as for the look and feel well, the new wear os is very minimal. Almost to a fault. Nearly everything is white text on black or gray a power saving high contrast, that’s very easy to read on this oled screen, but whether it’s emails or turn-by-turn directions in google maps. I can’t help but feel it’s also a little dull.
Take the app launcher. Wear os2. The old one used a lovely circular design that made smart use of the round screen and inject it a little fun with oversized colorful icons, while wear os 3 gives us this straight laced kind of joyless list of solemn gray pills.
The same goes for the settings screen recent apps pretty much any list in the os. I mean it’s fine, but i guess i just expected a little more panache here. It’S almost subdued enough to feel unfinished in the same vein. You want to hear the biggest surprise.
I ran into with this thing. Remember the google feed that used to live to the left of the watch face with contextual information, depending on the time of day yeah it’s gone completely, and so is the google assistant. I asked mont blanc about this and came away with the impression that the company would have included it if it could have so. I asked google about this and its only response was a generic disclaimer about taking the time to deliver a quality experience. So maybe assistant will come to the watch in the future, but this thing has been on sale for over a week and the fact that it’s not there now well, it only adds to the sense that this new platform still isn’t quite cooked that, and there are Still odd little quirks like the crown not scrolling in the phone app, which is a weird app to even have on this watch, because it doesn’t even have a speaker built in more broadly.
I think i’m just resetting my expectations here when wear os 3 first launched nearly a year ago on the galaxy watch 4. It was buried under so much samsung customization that it really didn’t feel like wear os at all. So i expected the first non-samsung watch running the platform to be a showcase for what a for lack of a better term pure wear os watch might feel like. But now it seems like google is reserving that experience for its pixel watch due in october, and this feels like something else.
Some kind of aosp-like framework upon which manufacturers can hang their own customized branded apps like check out the stopwatch or the timer or the alarm clock the compass, the entire fitness suite. All of this looks like it was designed by mont blanc and its partners, not google. That’S an interesting new direction for wear os and it has me eager to see what brands like fossil group will do with the platform down the road. I’D love to see some danish inspired software quirkiness on a future skogen piece, for example, and folks.
That’S about the end of the surprises everything else from the one-day endurance on the 400 milliamp hour battery to the hour-long charge. Time is pretty typical. It’S not that the summit 3 doesn’t shine. The titanium casing is hand, brushed and beautiful.
The leather bands are hand stitched, the alternative bands are plentiful and fun, and the sapphire crystal display cover is basically unscratchable. It’S a lovely piece but apparently it’ll take qualcomm’s new w-5 family of processors or a pixel brand name or possibly both to finally enable the next generation of wear os that i’m really waiting for until those arrive. I guess google’s smartwatch platform will continue to confuse as often as it delights. This video was made possible by a summit 3 review sample provided by montblanc, keep in mind, it’s not a full review, since i only spent a few days with it, and it received two software updates during that time plus i do expect the product to mature significantly Before the end of the year, as usual, no company was given editorial input or copy approval rights concerning this content, nor did they pay for its production until next time from michael fisher.
Thanks for watching and stay mobile, my friends, you .