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Those wonderful people at Brando, Sony Ericsson's PR company, have been extremely kind to me and sent one of there new LiveView devices for me to have a play with. Many thanks to Yasir Alani for giving us this opportunity!!
The LiveView is a device specifically targeted at the Android platform; for this review the LiveView unit was used with a Sony Ericsson X10 Mini Pro Android phone. It should be noted that the LiveView may work with other Android devices and I can confirm that I successfully used the device with my Motorola Milestone running Android 2.1.
I'll apologise now for the quality of some images, I had no way to take native screenshots on the LiveView itself, so I had to resort to my best endeavours with the camera, some turned out okay, some didn't!!
What's in the box!
Sony Ericsson LiveView
LiveView Wrist Strap attachment
LiveView Clip attachment
User guides
LiveView Charger
Aesthetics
The LiveView is a very neat wrist-watch sized device. It is sleek, jet black and very professional looking. It wouldn't look out of place as a wrist based communicator in an episode of Star Trek to my mind.
M preference was to wear the LiveView as a watch using the Wrist Strap supplied, I couldn't see me using the clip, I wasn't sure where or what I would clip it to. I thought the LiveView looked quite effective as a watch, and definitely an easier way to carry it about your person.
Front
Just the screen, nothing else. The screen is a 1.3" colour OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) display. The screen is also surrounded by 4 touch sensitive soft-keys. You can't see those keys, but they are there.
Back
The back is shaped, this is so the LiveView will fit into one or other of it's supplied carrying options (more on those later). Apart from that, the back merely embossed with the usual CE kitemark, serial number and other information. As with other SE products, the Sony Ericsson insignia badge is also proudly displayed.
Top
The top holds nothing but the two physical buttons, which are located one at each corner. The left hand button serves as the power button, and contains an LED to indicate when the unit is charging and has indeed finished charging.
Bottom
The bottom is just as spartan, in the centre we find the Micro USB charging socket, with a neat tightly fitting cover. This actually doubles up and serves as a notch that fits into a matching socket on the two carrying options supplied.
Left
Just one item on the left hand side, the power button at the top corner.
Right
Much like the left-hand side, just the action button at the top corner.
Bluetooth Pairing
As this is a Buetooth device, it is necessary to go through the pairing procedure. The LiveView is no more difficult than any other device.
First, switch on the LiveView by holding down the left hand button, keep the button held down and the unit goes into pairing mode as shown by the graphic depiction of rotating arrows between an image of the device and a phone.
On your Android phone, navigate to Menu/Settings/Wireless&Networks/Bluetooth Settings. Turn on Bluetooth and select 'Scan for Devices'. Once the LiveView device appears in the device list, tap it to select. A Bluetooth pairing message will appear, follow the instructions in the pairing request to complete the process.
Once that is done, you need to install the Android LiveView Application. This is the application that carries out all the comms between your device and the LiveView unit. Simply load up the Android Market and search for 'com.sonyericsson.extras', this will show you a list of apps which include both the LiveView Application itself, and a number of plug-ins that are available for the LiveView unit.
On running the LiveView Application, you will be presented with a screen that asks you to connect your LiveView device to your phone.
Simply hit the button on the right hand side on the unit and the connecting screen is displayed. Once the LiveView connects, the warning pop-up will disappear and you can move on to configuring your preferences.
Setup
The main options to set can be found by hitting the 'Manage Tiles' menu. This takes you on to the main built-in functionality of the LiveView device. From here you can configure what alerts you would like to see from a selction of text message, incoming calls, missed calls, Facebook, Twiiter, RSS & Calendar. All but Facebook, Twitter & RSS are just alert options to select with no further configuration required.
Selecting Facebook allows you to configure a plethora of options such as which friends to alert for, what activities to alert on & frequency of checking for Facebook updates.
It's much the same for Twitter, you can configure which Twitter friends you wish to see alerts for, as well as setting the frequency of said Twitter updates.
RSS
RSS allows you to enter your favourite RSS feeds and have them beamed over to your LiveView as they arrive. Again, you get the options of selecting which Web Feeds you want to include, and the update frequency at which you want the feeds polled.
LiveView In Use
The LiveView device offers quite a wide range of functions out of the box, I'll move through them in sequence;
Time & Date
Well, it's the Time & Date innit. A function you'd expect if you're going to wear it as a watch!
A single press on either the left or right buttons initiates the initial clock display. The clock is bright and clear, and is set by the initial connection to the phone over Bluetooth. The clock will persist when the LiveView is disconnected, unless the unit is reset, which then requires you to reconnect it to the LiveView application.All events
Imagine the All events function as a unified inbox, as the name implies, this is where you will find all your notifications in a single place. All events allows you to cycle through your chosen notifications one at a time in a continuous stream.
Text message
This one is pretty self-explanatory. When the LiveView is connected, any texts you receive on your phone will be replicated here. Text messages received when the device is not connected will not appear.
What can I say, your facebook feed will be here. This is totally configuration within the LiveView application, giving you the choice of receiving notifications, messages and your news feed. Each option is independently selectable along with which friends to receive updates from.
As with the Facebook feed, you'll find all your tweets here. You can configure which friends to receive tweets to the LiveView from, but you cannot select whether to receive tweets, mentions or direct messages independently.
Plug-ins
Initially empty, but this folder is where you'll find your 3rd Party plug-ins once installed. I'll go into this in more detail a bit later.
Find Phone
Activating this feature causes your phone to emit the default notification tone. I'm not sure of its total effectiveness seeing how the range of Bluetooth is about 10 meters, but then your mileage may vary on that one. It did what it said on the tin, on activating the feature, the phone sounded an alert.
RSS
Configure your favourite RSS feeds and view them here. The LiveView comes pre-configured with the BBC newsfeed, all you need to do is enable it. I did just that, and I discovered that a busy feed keeps you busy LiveView wise, the device was vibrating away like a good'un. Maybe less vibrant feeds would be a good idea!!
Calendar
This particular icon displays any calendar events that are generated from the phone. In my tests it worked perfectly well with the built-in calendar shipped as part of the Android OS, but not with the Roadsync Calendar, the calendar that was synchronised with my Exchange server. I guess you could get around this by syncing your Exchange Calendar to the Google Calendar using something like Goosync. I'll admit to not trying that part out.
Missed Calls
A log of your missed calls. I'm not sure there's much more to be said on this one?
Incoming Calls
The LiveView will also display incoming call notifications as well. If the number is in your contacts, it will display the caller's name. I found this to be a very useful feature when the phone was buried in my coat pocket.
Plug-ins
The plug-ins extend the functionality of the LiveView by allowing developers to make applications for the device; I took a look at some of the plug-ins available in the Android Market.
Where Am I
Where am I was the first plug-in I installed on the LiveView, mainly because it is just totally cool. As you can see in the screenshot, it loads a Google map of where you are on the screen using the phone as a GPS locator. I thought it was fantastic to have the maps ability available on my wrist, a little nerdy maybe, but still fantastic. As mentioned earlier, there are four touch points on the LiveView's screen, one at each edge, using the top and bottom touchpoints gives the ability to zoom in and out of the map, the screen refreshes and re-draws each time, but it is still very cool.
Ah watch
Another excellent plug-in, especially for those horologists amongst us. This one happens to be a clock I can tell the time from. I liked the circular display for the minute hand representation. Very cool.
Binary Clock
Even better for the horologists, a binary clock. I did like this one very much, there was only one problem with it and that was me. I discovered that I cannot tell the time in binary for love nor money. But, it did & does look cool!!
Contact Call
Contact Call is a very interesting plug-in. It gives you full access to the contacts stored on your phone and will even display the associated picture should one be available. You can cycle through the numbers associated with a contact, and dial the displayed number by simply tapping the right hand button. I should note that to end a call, you need to do that on the phone itself.
Viewfinder
Now Viewfinder is totally cool, very cool. It allows the LiveView to connect to the camera on your device, in this case a Sony Xperia X10 Mini Pro. The ultra-cool factor is that it beams an image from your camera to the LiveView, to me, this is totally Dick Tracy come to life if as I did, you wear the LiveView on your wrist in its watch configuration. From the LiveView you can control the shutter, the flash, the focus and the zoom, which gives you the power to actually take a photo remotely. I had great fun playing with this plug-in and taking photos remotely with the X10 Mini Pro placed on a shelf or cabinet. Top marks to pikkari, the author of this plug-in, it is a totally excellent job.
Moonphase
Another fine plug-in, Moonphase tells you the phase of the moon at the current time. Not a great deal of use unless you're into moon phases you might think, but I included this to show the excellent graphical capabilities of the LiveView itself. The picture of the moon is excellently rendered on the screen. Well, I was impressed for a device as small as the LiveView.
Weather Plug-in
Another more practical plug-in is the Weather Plug-in. As the name implies, use of the weather plug-in allows you to keep up with the weather in your area. The plug-in uses the geo-location abilities of your phone to set the location for the weather update. The weather readout details the location, the current conditions and the temperature. No fancy animations, just does exactly what it says on the tin and details the weather for you!!
Communications
I found the Bluetooth communication between the LiveView and the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro to be a bit hit and miss. The LiveView worked fine, and then over the weekend it became a little unstable. A better service was resumed with a power cycle of the Mini Pro itself, which leads me to think that there may have been some general issues with Bluetooth anyway. Possibly after being connected to the Bluetooth Handsfree kit built into my car. That being said, communications between the LiveView device and the X10 Mini Pro was still shaky. The good people at Brando sent me some hints and tips to try, and I did a little digging on the internet and discovered that a lot of the issues appear to be when the device is running low on memory, i.e. lots of applications and processes running, so I tried a little experiment.
I had installed a lot of things on the X10 Mini Pro during the review period, so I performed a factory reset on the phone, and then installed a minimum set of applications to begin with. As the LiveView displays both Twitter tweets and Facebook news feeds, I decided to leave those applications out as it would be double the data as well as the extra memory load. I re-installed the LiveView application and under advice the Liveware manager application. I then re-paired the LiveView with the X10 Mini Pro and connected it to the LiveView application, so far so good.
I re-installed some LiveView plug-ins and I'm glad to say, that since the early morning and throughout the day into the evening (21:30) on the day of my testing, I only had one disconnect incident, from which the LiveView reconnected with greater ease than before. In the following days before I returned the review unit, the connection was a lot more stable making the device a lot better in use.
Conclusion
The LiveView is an incredibly interesting device. The range of functionality it provides is very good. I found being notified of Tweets, Facebook entries, text messages and calls while my phone was still in my pocket to be very useful, and I used the review unit every day whilst I had it on loan. RSS is a kicker, as it is useful but so much can come through a feed it almost becomes intrusive, but each to their own on that one. The ability to extend that functionality by enabling developers to write plug-ins is a great addition, which I'm sure will engender some excellent support moving forward.
The LiveView certainly has some issues around connectivity when the memory on your Android phone is low; some management of what is running does do the trick of bringing stability. I found the functions that it provided incredibly useful day to day. I would like to see Sony Ericsson develop this concept on, as I think it is an excellent step forward from the Bluetooth watches that we've seen in the past.
