I've had the Ionic for about 2 weeks now and here is my review.
Likes:
I like the look of the watch and am especially pleased with the battery life (even using the GPS) of the watch. My previous smartwatch barely could make it a day without a charge, the Ionic I am charging about every 4 days. I also do like having the built in GPS for those activities or times when I don't want to carry my phone.
Dislikes:
I have to say I had high hopes for this watch but sadly I do believe I'll be returning it soon. Here's why...
Overall I am finding this watch is not a "Smartwatch" but rather a connected watch that blindly and stupidly just passes information back and forth to your connected device without any real logic.
Examples:
In order to receive notifications from your smartphone your watch needs to be in contact with the phone at the moment the notification is received on your phone. If you leave your phone on your desk and walk to your garage (leaving connected range with watch) when you return to a connected range your watch does not realize there was new notifications and thus does not notify you. Also, the phone and watch do not communicate to realize notifications where read on either the watch or smartphone, so in effect you end up reviewing them and clearing them on both devices.
Another downfall is that you cannot read email messages except for the subject line, you have to go to your phone to do that. Text messages are able to be read but for some reason if they are longer messages come to the watch as multiple messages. Another negative is the fact that you are unable to send or reply to texts and emails from the watch. Even being able to have a couple preset messages would be useful, but currently you have no option.
Another example of how this is a connected versus smartwatch is that you cannot answer or cancel phone calls from your watch, I am not talking about answering a phone call and talking into your watch but rather it is nice to be able to be away from your phone and cancel an incoming call from your watch (as I can do on my samsung watch) rather than having to walk to the phone to do that. Same thing with alarms set on your phone, you are alerted to them on the watch but cannot cancel them without returning to your phone.
Another pitfall I am finding on the Ionic is there are problems with the activity modes (I use the Run mode). When in run mode you do not receive notifications from the phone. When in the run mode it is basically locked in that mode, so you have to resort to pulling out your phone to see who is calling or check if you have texts or emails.
Another way this watch is connected and not smart is in how the watch handles runs data. If you do a run, once you end the run you lose the ability to see that runs statistics on your watch and you have no ability to see any of your previous runs on your watch, so to see any stats you need to return to your phone. I like to look at my current run data and compare it with other previous runs without having to access my phone. I could see all of my previous run data on my Samsung Watch. Fitbit tells me you can see this data on your watch with Strava, but it seems clunky and again requires the use of your smartphone to transfer this data to your watch. I am finding that transfer times have been as little as 20-30 minutes to as long as a couple days to transfer the run data to the watch (interestingly though it shows on the Strava app usually within minutes). Why should it require a second app and data transfer etc. to access this previous data on your watch?!
Another example of connected versus smart is with your sleep data. You are unable to look at your sleep data except on your connected device. I was able to do this on my Samsung Watch.
And lastly, when running the motion of twisting your wrist that normally wakes up your watch screen doesn't work all the well when running. So in order to wake the watch screen up you have to push a button, the 2 buttons on the right hand side if pushed either on purpose or by accident pause your workout and has numerous times caused my runs to not be reflected correctly. I wear my watch on my right hand and the right side buttons are easier to push while running, if I wore the watch on my left hand it may solve that problem but I don't like to wear it on that hand. Pushing the buttons should not automatically pause the run, maybe when the watch is in sleep/screen off mode the first push wakes up the screen and the second push gives you a prompt asking if you want to pause and the 3rd push would then pause, but don't have the first push wake the screen up and pause at the same time!
I am torn with this watch, it is a nice looking watch that is able to be in the water and has GPS and an excellent battery life but it lacking in a lot of ways that work on other smartwatches. Hopefully they can incorporate some of these fixes in future updates to the watch. In the meantime I think I be returning to my old Samsung watch.
