I first heard of the Martian smart watch in January of 2013, when I saw the first reviews of the product that started shipping as a result of the Kickstarter campaign and CES. I was a little surprised I’d never heard of Martian, since I regularly follow the smart watch tech category and had backed a few projects, including Pebble and the Metawatch Strata.
I really didn’t need another smart watch and most of the reviews were dismissive, but I really liked the idea of a “real” watch that could display information from my phone, so I went ahead and pre-ordered the black-faced Passport model with an optional leather strap. It took over 5 months, but my Martian Passport has arrived and I have to say I’m very impressed with it.
First off, a quick description: the Martian Passport watch has an analog face like a traditional wrist watch, however it doesn’t have a second hand. There is a small RGB LED at “4 o’clock”. The bottom third of the face has an OLED screen that displays a single line of text, which it scrolls like a ticker-tape. The watch has two buttons on the left side (Command and Status/Select) and a traditional crown on the right to set the time. There’s also a micro-USB port on the right side covered by a protective flap that’s used to charge the watch.
The Martian has a speaker and microphone built in and can connect to most phones that support the Bluetooth headset profile, although you will obviously get more functionality if you pair it to an Android or iOS device that can take advantage of the OLED display. The watch supports Bluetooth 4 (both Classic and Low Power modes).
The initial idea behind the Martian watch was to take advantage of the voice activated services like Siri and Google Now that were becoming all the rage, and to give you a speaker phone on your wrist. The OLED displayed Caller ID and SMS text information. The watch has a vibration motor to notify you when calls or texts arrive.
The voice command functions of the Martian work surprisingly well. Paired to my HTC One (Android 4.1.2), I can press the top button on the Martian which launches Google Now, and then speak whatever command I want to the watch, such as “what time is it in London?”. Google Now’s spoken response then plays out of the Martian’s speaker. The catch is Google Now doesn’t always talk back to you; sometimes it just displays web pages on the phone, in which case you won’t hear anything.
Theoretically you can use the Martian watch/smart phone combo to do things like dictate text messages, have it read you emails, messages, etc., but for me that functionality is limited as I want to see what the results are, so I’m never going to do this solely via the watch with my phone in my pocket. It does work well as a speaker phone, although it doesn’t get very loud so you’ll need to be in a quiet area to use it.
From left to right: Sony SmartWatch, Martian Passport, Pebble, Metawatch (original developers watch). Note I have installed leather bands on both the Martian and Pebble.
If that’s all the Martian did, I would agree with those early reviews that the Passport was a nice looking watch with a speakerphone gimmick. However during the time it took for my watch to arrive the developers behind Martian have added numerous features to their Android app to take full advantage of the OLED display.
Out of the box the Martian Android app (Version 1.46, with Firmware 1.47) is one of the best smart watch applications I’ve ever used. Once the watch is paired, you simply launch the app on your phone and you configure everything via the simple on-screen menus, which are broken down in to 4 categories:
Home: Here you can connect/disconnect your watch, enable/disable the LED, and set the watch’s vibration intensity (from 0 to 15). The vibration motor in the Martian is very strong, I’ve set mine to 2. You can also use the “Find Watch” feature which will play a musical scale from the watch’s speaker if you can’t find it on your desk.
Alerts: Here’s where you get to put that OLED screen to use. You can turn on/off alerts for text messages, “event” alerts like calendar notifications, Facebook notifications, Twitter notifications, and Gmail notifications. That’s great, but what if you use Google Voice as your primary text messaging service, or want to get USA Today Breaking News alerts send to the Martian? If you click the “Installed app notifications” item you’ll get a list of all your installed applications and you simply check them on or off to have their notifications sent to the Martian’s OLED screen. You can do that with the Pebble or Metawatches as well, but you need separate applications like Pebble Notifier to do it.
The Alerts screen also lets you enable Text-to-Speech if you want notifications read to you via the Martian’s speaker, and enable the Do Not Disturb feature which lets you schedule from/to times not to have notifications sent to the watch.
Status Display: Here you can configure two extra features when you press the bottom button: a second time zone and a weather forecast. When you press the Status button on the watch it cycles through displaying a status bar (battery strength, speaker volume, Bluetooth connected, and “leash” on/off, all on one line), then the date, and then any of the optional features you’ve turned on. I don’t know which weather service Martian is using but it seems very location-aware, accurate and gives a nice description along with the temperature, i.e. “Sky is clear, 81F”.
Setup: Here you can enable the leash, gesture controls, chose your date and time formats, scroll speed (I have mine set to 3, the fastest – I wish it went to 5, I want it to scroll faster), set the scroll delay (how soon it starts scrolling once the display lights up), and enable Google Now.
One interesting thing about Google Now is in the documentation I read it said you had to enable A2DP to get this to work. I didn’t want the Martian to be an A2DP device (I didn’t want my podcasts playing through it instead of my HTC One’s Boomsound speakers) so I enabled Google Now without A2DP and it works just find.
Overall I find the Martian Android app is very polished and all the features work perfectly. It even displays the watch’s battery level in the phone’s notification bar. Its amazing what a difference 5 months can make – functionally this is a completely different device that you’d expect from reading those reviews back in the first quarter of 2013.
As I mentioned above, the Martian has a “leash” feature that if active will notify you if you walk out of Bluetooth range of your phone. It will display a “Connection Lost” message on the display, and it will notify you again in 5 minutes if it still hasn’t re-connected. Besides the “find watch” function, there’s a similar “find phone” command you can invoke from the watch and have the same musical scale play from your phone. You have to be in Bluetooth range of the phone for it to work, but its nice that the option is there.
A couple other features: you can control the phone’s camera shutter from the Martian via it’s Camera Mode option, and there’s a Gesture Mode that lets you dismiss calls by raising your arm straight up and twisting your wrist back n’ forth (I’ve left both of these off).
The weather displayed on the Martian (it’s about to scroll) and the Pebble using the Futura Weather watch face
Weather temperature displayed at the end of the scroll
I love the information my Pebble provides at a glance, but even thought I’ve dressed it up with a leather strap the Pebble still looks like a nerdy plastic digital watch. My Martian Passport on the other hand actually looks like a watch. I think the design is very stylish and when the OLED display is off you probably wouldn’t guess it’s a connected device. Thanks to that display, however, I can see detailed information on my work emails, tech Twitter account I follow, and “urgent” Facebook notifications without ever taking my phone out of my pocket. It’s the best of both worlds.
Comparing Gmail notifications on the Martian and the Pebble
The battery life is very good – I got almost 4 days out of my Passport before the red LED came on at 20% life left (it displays this on the phone as well but the red LED is a nice touch), and even if the battery for the OLED/Bluetooth dies the watch display will keep going for another 30 days according to Martian. That’s actually very important – I took my Pebble on a trip and forgot the custom charging cable it requires and after three days it was useless. The Martian uses a standard micro-USB cable to charge, but even if you couldn’t charge it the watch will tell time for all but the longest trips.
Like I said, I really don’t use the Martian’s voice command mode much, I really want it to just be a “smart watch” via the OLED display. Currently the Martian will only connect to my Android phone as a Bluetooth headset – I can’t connect it just for the display like my Pebble or Metawatchs do.
At first I thought this was going to be a limitation, because it seemed I couldn’t connect my Bluetooth headsets to listen to podcasts or take calls while having the Martian connected and getting notifications. However I found a very simple work around. Before connecting my Jawbone Era or Motorola S9 HD headsets, I simply press both buttons on the Martian, which essentially turns Bluetooth off (the screen displays a “Goodbye” message so you now its off). Then I connect my headset, start playing a podcast, and then I press the two buttons on the Martian again. The display powers up and connects; it just doesn’t have the “Phone” headset profile active because the other headset is already connected. However it still displays notifications on the OLED screen! Martian technical support says they are looking into creating an option to use the watch just as a smart phone display, but until then this is an easy workaround. The best part is once I turn off my other headset the Martian connects automatically with the headset profile and now I can use Google Voice commands again if I want to.
One thing I initially found odd with the Martian is that every notification vibrates/displays twice. At first I thought one of the other notification apps on my phone was causing the issue, but after discussing it with Martian technical support I learned that it was designed this way. The thinking is it’s pretty easy to miss the start of a notification due to the scrolling, so after the first scroll ends the notification is displayed a second time. Apparently this is how Apple iOS phones work as well (which my wife confirmed, and hates). Hopefully the Martian app will be updated in the future to make this a configuration option.
It really is unnecessary since the Martian has another trick: if you tap the watch crystal within a minute of receiving a notification, it will display that last notification again. This is pretty cool and works great. I just wish it was persistent, meaning anytime I tap the watch face it would just display the last message, even if it was an hour ago. Martian is looking into that but cite battery life concerns (again making it configurable, say 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, would be great).
Other than notifying that the battery level is low, I haven’t really found much use for the LED. You’re going to notice the watch vibrate when you get a notification a lot easier than a double flash of the LED unless you happen to be looking at the watch at that particular moment. What would be better would be to bake into the Martian app functionality that lets you flash the LED for select notifications, select the color, and have it persistent until you press the bottom Select button (think along the lines of using Light Flow on a Nexus, Sony or Samsung phone). That way if you miss a notification because you’re talking to someone and forget about it, the next time you glance at your watch you could see a blinking blue light for an unread Twitter notification, or red for a missed call. The folks at Martian like the idea and promised to look into it, but again worry about the impact it could have on battery life.
Speaking of tech support, the folks I exchanged emails with at Martian were great. They really know their product, are enthusiastic about it, and respond to inquires quickly. Can’t ask for much more than that.
Overall I’m really pleased with my Martian Passport. It’s really difficult to directly compare it to the other smart watches currently available due to its unique display. The pure digital solutions can display more text and graphical information at a time, so you can see a full screen of a message at once, where as it takes longer for the Martian to display the same message as it has to scroll it across its single-line screen. But the trade-off is a stylish device that looks like a watch, instead of a plastic gadget strapped to your wrist. You can swim with a Pebble or Strata; the Martian is just “splash resistant” due to its speakers. The Martian’s OLED screen look fantastic indoors but washes out in bright sunlight; the LCD Pebble and reflective-matrix Metawatches are razor sharp outside but can be murky indoors.
The last thing to factor in is the cost. Pebble’s go for around $150, Metawatches from $129 to $199, and the Martian watches are $249 for the G2G models or $299 for the Passport (mine) and Victory models. The Martians are more expensive since they have true analog watch mechanisms along with the speaker and microphone, which none of the other smart watches have. It would be interesting to see what the price would be if Martian made a model without the speaker phone functionality.
My Martian Passport next to my Tag Heuer Monaco Vintage Limited Edition
Personally I think my Martian Passport is worth the extra money and it is currently my smart watch “daily driver”. It suits my style while still providing the connectivity options I want. Even though I don’t plan to use speaker phone/voice command functions, they’re nice options to have. If you want to process a lot of information quickly then I would say the Metawatch or Pebble is a better option, but if you want a real watch that can tell you what’s happening with that phone in your pocket, the Martian is highly recommended.
Notes: All photos were taken by me using a Samsung Galaxy Camera. All watches shown were purchased by me and are my personal property. All of my comments are based on the Android software with my watch paired with an HTC One Developers Edition.
Click Here to view Original article and images.
By Jeffrey Tschiltsch.
First Tech Problems