Alongside its new flagship LG V40 ThinQ smartphone, LG today introduced a brand new Wear OS smartwatch.
The LG Watch W7 is a "hybrid smartwatch" that includes physical watch hands and high-precision quartz movement. LG is even including a mechanical watch-only mode that disables the Watch W7's "smart" features in exchange for getting you up to 100 days of battery life on a single charge.
In addition to keeping track of time, the analog watch hands can display info like altimeter, barometer, stopwatch, timer, and compass directions. And when the watch hands are in the way of something you need to see on the display, you can press the top right button on the side of the LG Watch W7 to move them out of the way.
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
When it comes to the smart features of the LG Watch W7, it includes a round 1.2-inch 360x360 LCD screen, 768MB of RAM, and 4GB of built-in storage. There's a Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor included, not Qualcomm's newer Snapdragon Wear 3100 chipset, and a 240mAh battery that offers up to two days of battery life in full operation mode. All of those features are packed into a stainless steel body that's IP68 water and dust resistant. The Watch W7 is compatible with standard 22mm watch bands.
On the software side, the LG Watch W7 comes preloaded with the latest version of Google's Wear OS. It includes improved navigation, like letting you swipe up from the watch face to quickly jump to your notifications, swipe down to get Quick Settings, and swipe right to get to Google Assistant. Swipe left and you'll be taken to Google Fit.
The LG Watch W7 will be available from Best Buy for $449.99. Pre-orders will begin on October 7th, and the full launch is scheduled for October 14th.
