LG Watch W7 is the first hybrid Wear OS watch w/ mechanical hands, 100-day battery, $450

Ben Schoon | Oct 3 2018 - 2:23 pm PT

LG has been a major partner for Google’s wearable ecosystem long before it was called Wear OS, and today the company announced its latest smartwatch. The LG Watch W7 brings Google’s wearable platform, a new design, and some very unique ideas to the platform. Here’s what you need to know.

The LG Watch W7 isn’t your standard Wear OS smartwatch. Rather, it’s a hybrid watch that also packs Wear OS functionality. It has a 1.2-inch LCD display which has two mechanical hands on top. Those mechanical hands enable a “watch-only” mode which can run for a whopping 100 days on a single charge. Tapping the top right hardware button will move the hands to 3 and 9 o’clock so that users can read notifications.

It’ll need that extra mode for the battery too, as the LG Watch W7 still runs on top of Qualcomm’s older Snapdragon Wear 2100 chipset instead of the recently announced Wear 3100. That’s paired with a surprisingly small 240 mAh battery, 768mb of RAM, 4GB of storage, all wrapped up in a pretty chunky 44.5mm casing. With standard usage, the W7 lasts just 2 days. The crown on the side of the watch also rotates and controls the interface.

The mechanical hands on the LG Watch W7 can also be used for a handful of smart functions as well. It’s unclear if this new watch has any changes within Wear OS to adjust to this form factor.

In addition to keeping accurate time, the analog hands also display additional information such as altimeter, barometer, stopwatch, timer and compass directions. Because this device runs Wear OS by Google, it can be customized thousands of different ways with unique watch faces and complications available online. What’s more, the watch is compatible with all standard 22mm watch bands.

As for pricing, the LG Watch W7 comes in at a whopping $449. It’ll be available starting October 14th from Best Buy, with pre-orders opening up on October 7th.

By the way, this all seems like a really bad idea.

If you push the top right button, the LG Watch W7 mechanical hands move out of the way so you can read your notifications. It sort of works. pic.twitter.com/YmuPrAQDEz

— Avi Greengart (@greengart) October 3, 2018

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