ISSUE 71 • ANDROID ADVISOR 47and lumbering Android Wear and Wear OS watches,
and the Puma Smartwatch is the most frustrating
by a fairly significant margin. It got so bad, I started
regularly checking for a system update that I assumed
was on the way to fix the pre-production bugs and
performance issues. But one never came.
Here are just a handful of issues I experienced
during my two weeks with the watch:
- Pressingthesidebuttondoesnothing.
- Pressing the side button appears to do nothing
but actually takes five seconds to bring up the
appscreen. - Pressing the side button appears to do nothing
but actually takes five seconds to bring up the
appscreenandthenimmediatelycrashes. - The always-on display blinks repetitively for
a minute. - The default watch face doesn’t register my
heartrate. - The default watch face doesn’t render properly
whenwakingfromsleep. - Steps don’t register.
And so on. Even when the watch worked as
expected, simple tasks took several beats longer
than they should have. It was rare when a tap or
a scroll was smooth or immediate, and using the
watch felt like it was in perpetual slow motion.
Other aspects of the watch slowed me down as
well. For the first few days, I was regularly prompted
to agree to permissions that I had already Okay’d