BARCELONA, Spain—At Mobile World Congress, LG is showing off its third—and fourth—smartwatch: the LG Watch Urbane and Watch Urbane LTE.

First things first, LG's naming scheme here is pretty confusing. The names would lead you to believe these are two versions of the same basic watch just with and without LTE. Actually, these are two completely dissimilar watches with very similar names. The Watch Urbane runs Android Wear, while the Urbane LTE runs LG's in-house smartwatch software (which we suspect has WebOS roots). The Urbane has a more sophisticated "jewelry watch" design, while the Urbane LTE is more of a sports watch with the same numbers on the bezel as the G Watch R. And finally, the Urbane LTE is HUGE.

The LG Watch Urbane—a traditionally styled smartwatch

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

The Urbane is LG's attempt at a jewelry-like watch, the type of smartwatch design that we think will be most successful. It's an all-metal body with a fully round screen and a bezel. It's pretty much the LG G Watch R in a newer, nicer-looking body with identical specs.

The watch is available in polished steel or a brass/gold color, and bands are available in leather or a matching metal finish. Like the G Watch R, there is still a sizable bezel around the display, but this time the watch doesn't have the usually irrelevant number markings in the bezel.

The Urbane has the same internals and OS as the G Watch R, so there isn't much new ground to cover concerning the performance. It should have the best battery life of the smartwatches out there, but will still struggle on heavy days.

The Urbane looks better than the G Watch R, but we still have to give the design win to the Moto360, which will look better on most wrists. Today's smartwatches push the size limit of a watch, making one of the key stats the "lug-to-lug distance" or the distance between the watch band connection points on the top and bottom of the watch body.

The Urbane has lugs that stick out from the watch body, making an already-big device look even bigger. On smaller wrists, there will be air between your wrist and the lugs on the watch. The Moto 360 has the lugs inside the watch body, which gives the watch a better fit—the last two pictures in the above gallery really tell the whole story.

And keep in mind the Moto 360 does this while providing a bigger screen than the Urbane (1.3 inches versus 1.5). The Urbane does give you a fully round screen, but for something that is supposed to provide glanceable information, we prefer the larger screen and bigger text.

LG Watch Urbane LTE—Maybe this would fit The Hulk?































The Urbane LTE aims to bring standalone capability to the smartwatch by including an LTE modem right in the watch. This doesn't initially seem to be the best idea in the world, and it results in a number of changes.

Like the G Watch R and Watch Urbane, the Urbane LTE has a 1.3-inch circular POLED display with a 320x320 resolution, a 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400, and 1GB of RAM.

While Android Wear is a stripped-down version of Android, one of the things Google stripped out was the network stack. There is currently no way to build a standalone Android Wear watch—so LTE had to use something else. What it went with is a self-made smartwatch OS that probably uses the WebOS codebase. LG only calls it the "LG Wearables Platform," which is probably one of the most boring OS names in history.

Unlike Android Wear, the OS is app icon-centric. The home screen shows a group of circular icons that scroll in a fading spiral. It's hard to get a real sense for the OS without being able to spend more time with the device or tether a phone to it, but it seemed to be pretty complicated. LG already has a few app partners lined up, and the company was even demoing an Audi app.

The second big change for the LTE modem—and this is really a deal breaker for us—is the size. LTE takes a lot of power, necessitating that LG pack in an 700mAh battery. The battery and LTE apparently take up a lot of space, because the Urbane LTE is HUGE. In the gallery, above, you can see it dwarfs the already huge Moto 360. We have a hard time believing something like this would look good on anyone other than the largest of humans—it's just way, way too big.

The design is rough as well. The Urbane LTE seems to reverse all the good decisions LG made with the non-LTE Urbane. There are numbers on the bezel, much like the G Watch R. On a screen that frequently isn't displaying analog clock hands, it's a bad idea as the numbers are often irrelevant. The watch band is back to rubber, and the clasp uses the same clunky overlapping design as the Samsung Gear Live.

For now, smartwatches are all about the look. While the non-LTE Urbane has a chance of looking good on someone with larger wrists, the LTE version appears too huge to take seriously. We didn't think either LG entry was the smartwatch of the show, though. That award goes to the Huawei Watch, which we'll have more on later.

Listing image by Ron Amadeo