This year has been earmarked as the year of wearable technology already, and LG has joined the party early doors with the LG Lifeband touch. We got to spend some time with the smartwatch at CES 2014, so continue reading for our LG Lifeband Touch hands-on review. The LG Lifeband Touch is a smartwatch that also tracks your activity as your go about your day, the Lifeband can connect to your Android or iOS smartphone via Bluetooth and display alerts/messages on its OLED screen. The best way to think of the LG Lifeband Touch is as a smartwatch and a fitness tracker merged into one. It has all the normal features that you would expect a smartwatch to have; meaning you can see your smartphone’s alerts and messages on the watch face (as well as telling the time). The real USP is that it also features and altimeter and accelerometer, so it can record your day-to-day activity; measuring your steps, hill climbs and distance walked/ran. To really complete the activity tracker features set, the Lifeband Touch also has a heart rate monitor, so it can measure your daily calorific output with enhanced accuracy. The Lifeband Touch has a clear touch OLED display that is pretty funky and unique in the way that is shows you the time – it’s displayed vertically rather than the conventional horizontal way, not a major issue, but we imagine it will take a little bit of getting used to. The design of the watch itself is very cool. It has ditched the normal strap and lock you’d expect to find on a wristwatch, in fact, the LifeBand Touch doesn’t even go fully round your wrist. Instead it warps around about 90% of you wrist leaving a gap of a couple of centimetres; this design allows the watch to sit nicely on your wrist and present its face to you without the device being too chunky. Don’t get us wrong, it’s still unashably big (and cool), but not in a completely farcical way. For a watch that lacks a clasp and doesn’t go fully rounds your wrist we found it surprisingly secure, and importantly it also felt comfortable. Oh, it’s splashproof (not waterproof) too.
One of the major problems with smartwatches is that the battery life is obviously nowhere near what you’d get from a normal timepiece. LG are claiming you can get 5-days worth of use with the Lifeband Touch – from our experience with smartwatches we think that this is about average for the market. The LG Lifeband Touch is due to go on sale in Q2 2014 and will cost $179 which works out at just over £100.
