ASUS ZenWatch review: subtle and stylish, with a few shortcomings

SUMMARY

ASUS's first Android Wear watch is one of the most stylish we've seen, and feels great on the wrist, to boot. Unfortunately, it suffers form mediocre battery life, an erratic heart monitor and an unsightly bezel surrounding the screen. In the end, though, the ZenWatch's balance of looks, performance and relatively low price make it a worthy choice for anyone who wants an Android Wear device and doesn't want to wait for all those second-gen models to come out.

Hardware

You might not agree with ASUS' design choices, but you can't blame the company for shooting for style when it has the same dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 and 512 of RAM that've popped up in nearly every other Android Wear watch to date. There's also 4GB of flash storage under the hood in case you want to listen to music on the run without having to lug around a phone while you're at it, though that's hardly novel either.

Display

Painfully dated jokes aside, the screen's generally a pleasure to cast your eyes on, even if those peepers have been spoiled by the smartphone the watch is connected to. It runs at 320 x 320 (that's a pixel density of 278 ppi, if you're keeping count), making it marginally crisper than the G Watch R, though Sony's SmartWatch 3 still beats it by a hair