Summary

The manual (pdf) is comprehensive and describes the non-WearOS functionality well. r/WearOS covers the WearOS side - check the sidebar too. It is also worth noting that current watches tend to use identical hardware (same qualcomm chipset, same screen resolution, same RAM, same storage etc) although extras like microphones, speakers, NFC differ.

Starting point

I've used Casio digital watches for as long as I can remember. Because they are water resistant, the watch can go anywhere I do, and I never take them off. My favourite over the last decade has been the Solar Atomic models. Solar means I never need to change the battery, and "atomic" means picking up the radio time signals that came from an atomic clock.

Smartwatch?

Watches provide two conveniences for me - it is always there, and I can look at it very quickly. Phones are in chargers, pockets, etc and take longer to extract and navigate to what you wanted to see.

Needing to be familiar with smartwatches, and to do development work I naturally picked the Casio offering which is upper mid-range in pricing.

First Time User Experience (software)

The FTUE is terrible. Android Wear WearOS watches are not mature yet, and require a lot of compromise to keep within available battery, cpu and software functionality. It feels a lot like being given a decade old phone and told to make it work now.

Simultaneously the watch will be doing system updates, installing or updating apps, and have some tutorial overlay you can't just dismiss. All the while you are learning the compromises you'll have to make.

To be clear - it is sluggish. There will be 5 seconds between taps and resulting actions. The screen will go black for several seconds while apps launch. You are never certain if touches or button presses registered, and often end up doubling them which makes things worse. I also found the onscreen keyboard useless since I could never touch the right spot.

Things do settle down over time, but that sluggishness still remains some of the time. What helped me the most was to enable developer options and turn on "Show Taps". That confirms a tap was registered and shows where is was, helping with feedback and making the keyboard more useful.

Charging

Charging is done with a magnetic attached cable. The box came with a small USB power brick, and the USB to round magnet charging cable. I have never used the supplied power brick, and have had no problem connecting to any USB power source. I also bought a third party USB C to magnet off Amazon, and use it the most of the time. In short the watch is not fussy about charging.

When sitting at my desk, the cable will stay in place providing there isn't too much unsupported cable length, so that is the main way I charge the watch.

Watch Display

• A monochrome digital time display, easily readable in sunlight and difficult to read in low light. Uses a lot less power than the colour display. You can run in this mode for 30 days with WearOS turned off. When WearOS is running then only Casio apps can write to this screen (other apps just have the standard time display)
• Ambient mode colour display (lowest brightness). Unreadable in direct or indirect sunlight. This is used when idle with power consumption based on how many pixels are not black.
• Colour display which uses lots of power, is readable in indirect sunlight and generally impossible to read in direct sunlight.

If you have the full colour display on and are interacting with apps, a full battery will be drained in about an hour. Consequently much use of the watch is setting the display mode you want to trade off power consumption, readability, and response time.

You can have the display activated by touch, button press, and rotating your wrist. My experience of wrist activation is that it rarely works when you want it too, and often activates when you don't. Because it activates full brightness, the battery can be very quickly drained.

Thoughts

WearOS is a lot less mature than expected. It is unclear if Google is losing interest.

Most watch faces try to be pretty and based on analog hands. It is difficult to find dense digital displays.

The Casio apps do work well. I'm glad Casio used WearOS instead of doing their own operating system with limited apps etc. However the result including their gshock style case seems pricey. A few more years of new models should improve this.

Ultimately you figure out how to get the watch to work for you, requiring more administration than a non-smartwatch. For me the benefits outweigh the hassle. I use Theater Mode from quick settings to have the time showing most of the time.

Fundamentals

I recently decided to get a multipurpose device. They can do all this:

• Large battery to recharge other devices over USB (eg your phone and tablet)

• Provide wifi access to a network in front of it

  A wifi network is provided behind the device with a name and password of your choosing. You connect one or more of your devices to that.

  In front of it you can have no network at all, a wifi network (unrelated to the one behind), or a wired ethernet network. You do have to configure access to the network, but only for this device. Your devices are behind it blissfully ignorant of the real network.

• Exports attached storage (eg USB stick, USB hard drive, sdcard) via both SMB (aka "Windows network file sharing" supported by virtually everything these days) and DLNA (a multimedia network protocol, supported by many although the Apple ecosystem prefers "iTunes")

  On Android and desktop systems, you'll find that Kodi works for both SMB and DLNA, as does Android ES File Explorer (SMB only).

• They are cheap ($40 - $60 depending on battery capacity)

• Can run completely off the battery so no additional power is needed. They will run for many hours. They will also run while being charged.

• Similar in size to a pack of cards

• They use popular standards - eg they charge using standard micro-USB, provide power for devices with standard USB port, use existing filesystems, standard protocols etc. There is no need to carry different cables or chargers, and any software speaking SMB or DLNA works.

After some agonizing over Amazon reviews, and reading the manuals, I ended up with two.

The left red one is a HT-TM05 TripMate Versatile Wireless N Travel Router (Amazon page) although the packaging and internal names say Tripmate Sith. The right white one is a RAVPower RP-WD02 Wireless Filehub / Portable Travel Router (Amazon page). They are sold by the same company, and the underlying products are substantially similar except for the hardware layout.

How they do all this turns out to be quite simple. The battery provides power, and there is a small Linux based computer attached. It is running a MIPS based processor (the manuals even tell you the exact manufacturer and model number), 32MB of RAM, and 8MB of builtin storage for their software. For some reason MIPS cores seem very popular in network access devices - if you have a box at home from the likes of Linksys, DLink, Netgear etc, it is almost certainly using MIPS.

Praise

They fundamentally do what they say. Both RAVPower and Hootoo provide Android and iOS apps to help access and configure the devices. However neither requires it and you can do all the configuration work in a web browser by going to the device address (default 10.10.10.254). It looks like the apps are really just some logic to find the device on the network, and then show the admin pages in a WebView. Note that I have never tried the apps.

Each device has some nice highlights the other doesn't. (If only someone made something combining the best of both.) The Hootoo has some lights on top to see battery level (they only light when you press the button as I did before taking the photo). The RAVPower has a micro-sdcard slot. The Hootoo can stand up. The RAVPower has a label giving default username, passwords and IP address. The Hootoo web admin pages are nicer, simpler and mobile optimised. The RAVPower ones tell me the device's external IP address. The Hootoo's lights go on or off in sequence during power on and power off so you have progress feedback.

As a test I left the HT-TM05 10,400mAh device on and connected to the wifi network. I didn't have anything connected to it, so this is a measure of the longest it can continuously run. After 45 hours (3 hours short of two full days) it had dropped to one battery led (out of four), and I decided to recharge it rather than deplete the battery completely. That is an impressive runtime. The RTP-WD02 has a 6,000mAh battery so you would expect a proportionate maximum runtime around 28 hours.

Suggested Improvements

The RAVPower has ports on 3 sides, which can lead to cables sticking out in all directions. The Hootoo is nicer with ports on two sides next to each other. Sadly the micro-USB for charging is right next to the USB for connecting storage. If the cables connecting either are anything but skinny heads then you can't have both connected. If you use an sdcard reader on the Hootoo then it will overlap the charging port. You get a choice of too dense ports (Hootoo) or not dense enough (RAVPower).

Hootoo really should have a builtin sdcard reader.

The web admin UIs have no help. When you want to safely remove attached storage, you'll end up at a page with a button labeled "Delete". It takes a lot of courage to press the button, to confirm that it really means "remove" or "eject" (it does). Firmware updates on both devices added an "auto jump service", you can enable or disable. Good luck on figuring out what that does!

Censure

$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.36 (gcc version 3.4.2) #8 Fri Jul 11 10:44:45 CST 2014
$ /usr/sbin/smbd --version
Version 3.0.24

$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.21 (gcc version 3.4.2) #5 Fri Nov 1 13:36:46 CST 2013
$ /usr/sbin/smbd --version
Version 3.0.24

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under
   Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1
   and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

   a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source
      code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2
      above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

   b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to
      give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically
      performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the
      corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections
      1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

   c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to
      distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only
      for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in
      object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with
      Subsection b above.)

- Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
  notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
  the documentation and/or other materials provided with the
  distribution.

Bridge mode

Both products' Amazon pages claim to support a bridge mode, but this marketing fluff and not the term as understood by networking people. They never bridge in the sense that those behind the device and the network in front are joined making a unified LAN. The devices always do network address translation (NAT) and never any form of bridging.

Admin Pages

As far as I can tell, Hootoo are the firmware developers. Their older products as well as the RAVPower use a fairly clunky web interface. It looks like a singe page application but doesn't do it well.

The Hootoo has a newer web interface where the URL changes as you navigate around pages, making it much easier to see what is going on, send links to others or other devices etc. It is also mobile centric giving the same pages that look good on a phone, as to a large monitor.

I had a quick look at authentication to see if there were any simple holes. Both use their own login screen, which means your browser can't prompt you nor remember the password. They set a session id cookie and require it to be present for other web accesses.

The pages are always over http, and not https, although there isn't much of an alternative. (Browsers are getting very hostile to self signed certificates.)

Both devices ended up with a second web server on port 81 (standard http is port 80), that appears to be related to the admin server. There is no need for it, and I'd be concerned about what it does.

Many changes cause the device to reboot and your browser to show a many minute "please wait" message. This gets very annoying. I understand why it is done (far simpler to code and test), but not doing it so much would be a more pleasant experience.

Firmware updates require storage to be connected as the devices don't have temporary storage. On both devices they also wiped out all settings.

RAVPower update

20 May, 2015

I sent an email to RAVPower support around the network exposing and GPL issues. There was no response. A few days later there was a comment on my Amazon reviewing asking me to email support, so I did a second time.

They claimed the issue had been fixed with new firmware, and a pointer to some source. I can confirm that the new firmware does indeed stop exposing network services to the public.

The source link was to Hootoo's website and looked like an effort had been made for some GPL awareness. It included a document outlining components, their version numbers, and license. It also included the kernel source code and Samba (including patches). I did verify the kernel and Samba versions matched, but did not verify they could be built or were exactly what was on the device (both GPL requirements). There didn't appear to be much other source present.

I did have more interaction with support, who didn't understand the difference between telling me about that source drop and actually complying with the GPL. It needs to be available to all users (without having to ask), requires copyright notices be present, be complete and more.

Hootoo update

28 May, 2015

Email to Hootoo support went unanswered. However I did see new firmware appear, which claimed to add exFAT support.

On the network exposed front, the telnet server was disabled, but another web admin server appeared on port 81.