I had an lg g watch r for a while, and now have an Apple Watch (first gen, SS)
Haptics: Apple Watch has nice, quiet haptics - android wear by contrast was more like a usual vibration and that could be quite noisy in quiet situations. On Apple Watch in silent mode is great at providing discreet notifications. On the other hand, it is really disapppointing that Apple Watch doesn't allow more customisation of the haptics. You can tap out a custom vibration pattern for notifications on iPhone, yet you can't carry that over to the watch. It would be such an obvious improvement being able to tell who is sending you a message or calling you. Especially frustrating because android wear lets you do that, and it's great.
Telling the time: quite a useful thing for a Watch to be able to do. But here Apple Watch falls down by not having the option of an always-on mode. Android wear always-on is a godsend. I often glance at my watch without making large wrist movements and Apple Watch is annoying when I can't check the time by doing this. I don't need onboard GPS so let me choose to use the battery life for something I'd find really useful.
Watch faces: hands down (sorry) android wear wins here. There are a couple of usable Apple Watch faces, but I hate being restricted to just a handful of presets, along with limited customisation of complications. Using an app like Facer on Android wear you can easily create a completely custom Watch face and custom complications in any locations you want.
Complications : complications on Apple Watch are much better now than they used to be, with third party support. But they are still quite limited by not being directly interactable - they all display some info and jump to an app (except the stopwatch complication on the chronograph face). With custom faces on android wear you can easily have buttons that do things right there, rather than jumping off to an app - e.g. Stopwatch, timer, toggle weather display. With a little work you could set up a face that did most things you wanted to do without ever having to leave the Watch face.
Key things I really hope Apple Watch adds soon to make it that much more usable for me would be
- custom haptics
- always on mode.
- custom watch faces (third party or make your own), including complication locations
- interactable complications
You make some decent points that I would have made as well.
After a few days with the Apple Watch I have to say it is overall a much better experience to me then Android Wear. Android Wear has yet to get the user-interface right (and I've been running the Developer Preview of Android Wear 2.0). It's definitely snappier (and that's using the original Watch), both the navigation and things like Siri work quicker and respond better than Android Wear does right now.
I definitely miss custom watchfaces, but I find it less troublesome than I thought, mostly because the options you have for watchfaces and the complications give it enough personalisation to be useful in any case. I don't mind the complications themselves not being directly interactible, since they immediately load you into the app in question and that's pretty seemless there isn't that much difference between doing stuff directly on the watchface. I imagine with the dual core Watches that's gonna be even more seamless all around.
As for the screen, the Apple Watch has a gorgeous display. It really is a shame that they didn't use AMOLED and allow always on, but I've gotten used to flicking my wrist when I want to look at the watch and when it's on the use of color and the saturation and blacks are just perfect. Android Wear, especially 2.0, is just a dull interface using blacks, and dark blue along with other timid colors. WatchOS is full of colors, design elements like transparency, gradients and animations (I love it when I get an e-mail and flick on the screen so the gmail icon shows up, minimizes and moves to the upper right to bring in a preview of the mail I just got, for instance). It just makes the watch more fun to interact with. Wear will buzz (no gentle tap, esp. the Huawei Watch which just has the nastiest and loudest vibration motor) and the notification will be there. I dunno, I'm a UID guy by profession and subtle animations will always be more my thing than straight forward pop-ups. Another thing is finally having an Ambient Sensor (both the LG G Watch R and Huawei Watch don't have one) makes the watch way better to see in the sun, both those devices, even at their brightest, were impossible to make out in sunlight. The Apple Watch does much better. It also is much better viewed at an angle compared to those two devices.
Where the Apple Watch really outclasses Android Wear is in the fitness department. Where Wear relies fully on 3rd party and only has a half-assed Google Fit implementation, the Apple Watch just comes packed with everything I need out of a fitness tracker. I love that it checks my heart rate throughout the day. I love that I can start a workout and it will track not only my heartrate, pace, but also checks the weather and humidity. The Activity and Health App are great, being able to check where I've been, how fast I walk each km, what my heart rate was throughout the workout is just fun. And while all this is doable on Wear through third party apps, a Wearable should come with functions like this out of the box. Google Fit out of the box pretty much tracks only basic things like how many steps you've walked and the distance (though for walking, it won't use GPS and do an estimate). Without the fitness functions, it's just a notification box. Which is okay, but not great. The Apple Watch definitely makes you want to move more and makes it more fun to reach your personal goals. (Also great for making me take my hourly breaks when I'm at work, once I start programming I often forget to move for hours).
The Apple Watch isn't perfect yet, by any means, battery life is just not there. Between 18 and 20 hours a day just isn't enough, Android Wear gets you 32 to 48 hours on most devices. Wear gives you the always-on screen, too, but doesn't do heart rate checks, so I'm not sure what the impact is there. Another thing that I would enjoy is a more watch-like watch, so with a circular display. While the Apple Watch certainly isn't ugly, it does look too much like a device and not enough like an accessory like regular watches do. I definitely liked my circular Android Wear watches more, though the Huawei Watch is too bulky. All in all, I don't mind the Apple Watch looks at all, but I do hope we get a more inspired design in the future.
Either way, the Apple Watch is way ahead of Android Wear at this point as far as OS and capabilities go, it'll be interesting to see where third parties take Wear with the 2.0 update and the stand-alone apps, but it'll be a while until they catch up to where Apple is right now.
(While writing this I managed to abbreviate both Android Wear and Apple Watch to AW more than once, this made things very confusing. That can't have been a coincidence by the folks over at Google.)