SONY Smart Watch

The thought of having a watch that lets you know when you've got an email or social media alert is cool, right? It's the stuff of Bond movies and future explorers, and that's cool.

Well, sort of. While Android-powered Sony's Smart Watch, which lets you interact with social media without touching your phone, seems like a cool idea on paper. Actually, in practice it's not a lot of fun and the novelty soon wore off.

Priced at $169 and with a 1.3-inch OLED screen, the Smart Watch seems to connect best to (funnily enough) Sony's own Xperia model phones (I tried to use my Samsung Galaxy S3, but it refused several attempts to pair over Bluetooth). Surprisingly for Sony, a company that often impresses me with its design, the Smart Watch is rather plain looking: A square body and a rubber strap. That's it.

Once your phone has connected to the watch you'll have to set up each account you want to monitor individually - email, social networking sites - and every time you receive an email or tweet a notification appears on the Smart Watch's display.

The watch buzzes a little bit every time you get a notification and you have to tap the watch's face then swipe until you find the relevant application. You can drag left and right, up and down through installed applications and double tapping the screen will take you to the previous screen.

I once replied "Nice" to a tweet while I was actually trying to double tap the screen to take me back to the previous screen. Because of the small screen it was just fiddly responding to tweets and emails. I'd rather keep using my smartphone, like I do now.

I thought the Smart Watch would appeal to my inner geek - and it did initially - but after a few days the novelty had worn off and I actually went back to my smart phone to check my emails and social media notifications pretty quickly. Things were just easier to read on the larger screen of my phone.

Sony's Smart Watch seems the stuff of Bond movies and all futuristic, but to be honest, the often fiddly nature of actually using the touch screen makes it not so cool at all. If I were you, and you're tempted, save your $169 and put it towards a cheap smart phone instead.