Review: Martian Voice Command

After much initial success with the Martian Notifier, Martian is back with their new smartwatch, Martian Voice Command. The Voice Command comes in 3 different designs; Passport, Victory and G2G . The watch is very much like the Notifier with the exception of the embedded speakers. We’ll be covering the Victory design in this review. Let’s take a quick look at the features.

Features:-

• Access all smartphone’s alerts and notifications instantly
• Customize alert vibration patterns for eyes-free notification awareness
• Enables smartphone’s voice command from the watch
• Hands-free text messaging while on the go
• Answer or place a call through the watch
• Silent alarms, hour repeater, virtual phone leash, find phone, camera shutter control, and more!
• For iOS and Android

Review

Hardware

Design & Build Quality

The Martian Victory smartwatch, one of the design of Martian Voice Command, comes in four different colors; silver, black, gold and white. Like the Notifier, Martian Voice Command has a traditional look of a normal watch but with an exception of a OLED display placed at the lower half of the watch. There is also a RGB LED indicator light which lit up whenever a notification comes in.

Unlike the Martian Notifier, the Martian Voice Command has a built-in speaker. The speaker is located at the bottom edge, below the micro-USB port of the watch. There is also a noise-cancelling microphone which is embedded in the watch, hidden from view. Other than that, the rest is pretty similar to the Notifier.

The Martian Voice Command smartwatches are also not waterproof but they are splash-resistant as long as the micro-USB flap is in place.

Display

All the Martian Voice Command smartwatches has a 96 x 16 pixels OLED display located at the lower half of the watch.

Similar to the Martian Notifier, the display panel for Martian Voice Command is tiny too. Wordings are definitely easy to read with an exception of the number of wordings shown on the display. Other than that, we have absolutely no trouble reading the display panel in a bright lit environment.

Battery Life

The Martian Voice Command comes with two internal batteries in it;  a standard button cell which helps to power the analog part of the watch while a lithium polymer rechargeable batter runs the smartwatch part of the watch. Martian claims that the watch have a 2 hours of talk time and a 7 days of standby time with a full charged. We found that the watch lasted about 4 days on average due to incoming notification from different apps, usage of voice command and answering calls through the watch.

The Martian Voice Command charges using a standard micro-USB just like the Martian Notifier. However, unlike the Notifie, the port is more easily accessible so users can use any micro-USB cable.

Software

The Martian Voice Command comes with a free companion app where users can download it from the Google Play Store or Apple’s App Store.

Like the Notifier, the Voice Command also has the feature for users to customize the vibration pattern for notification alerts. For example, users can set up incoming calls to have a long-long-long vibration and messages to long-pause-long vibration. This is great because users can tell what notifications came in based on the vibration patterns itself. Users can also set the vibration intensity of their watch and how long is the message delay.

Besides that, for Android users, it is necessary to set the settings that when the “Command” button was pressed, it would launch the Google Now app. Otherwise, it will open the Google Dialer app whenever the “Command” button is pressed.

Final Thoughts

The Martian Victory is a great smartwatch. Priced at $229, the Victory is much more expensive than the Notifier due to its extended capabilities. The design of the watch, with its incorporation of both the analog and OLED display, might appeal to users that wants a smartwatch with the look of a traditional analog watch.

The ability to customize app notifications and vibration patterns for each notification is definitely a nice touch and unique. However, a drawback which we found was whenever we place or receive a call, the watch acts as a Bluetooth headset by default, which can be annoying. We didn’t know that and we were caught by surprise with our first call as the caller’s voice came through our smartwatch instead of our phone’s earpiece.