Now before you roll your eyes and close my blog because of another rose gold thing: stop! The Q Venture also comes in black, silver, and gold!

Lately I’ve been trying to decide if I want to take the leap and buy a smartwatch, so I decided to rent this watch through Expese first (you can read all about them here). As soon as the watch arrived, I was excited to take it out of the box and start peeling off the plastic! The one downside I quickly realized was that this was meant to look like a real watch, which meant that the band was made of links. Out of the box, the watch was huge. It didn’t even fit on Tony’s wrists. I didn’t want to mess with taking links out since I’m just renting the watch, so I did what any good millennial would do: I Amazon’d. I ordered a new, adjustable band off Amazon, knowing I could use it for my rental period and return it immediately after. The band arrived a day later, which meant I still had plenty of time to test out the watch. (Side note: it was actually a super great band, and it comes in multiple colors to match the watch.)

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: I far prefer a circular smartwatch over anything else. I know Apple designed their square watch to stand out, but it doesn’t look natural. I like that circular smartwatches don’t stand out from an analog watch, until someone sees you talking to your wrist like a weirdo. (Which I did.)

The screen itself is very clear and easy to use. Swiping in different directions gives you different results; swiping down brings up your settings panel, while swiping up shows your notifications. Reading and replying to messages is fairly easy, but certainly not easier than getting out my phone and using that. Believe it or not, the Q Venture actually does have a keyboard you can use, but I found it much easier to use voice to text instead.

The biggest downside about the Q Venture is using yet another device that needs to be charged. When traveling, I already need to bring a USB-C for my Pixel/KEY2, lightning cable for my iPad, and USB micro for my external battery. Having a smartwatch just adds another cord, since it can only be charged on the wireless charging pad. The battery typically lasted around 12 hours, which isn’t enough for me most days. I’m sure you could stretch out the battery by turning off the “always on” option, which always faintly displays the clock. It also took a while to charge, so I wasn’t able to quickly charge it after work before going out.

While writing this review, I realized this is actually my third experience with smartwatches. (You can read my first thoughts from 2015 here and my second thoughts from 2016 here.) While it’s always fun to test these things out, I’m never convinced enough to buy one for myself. In the meantime, I’ll keep renting them from Expese for a week and then gladly give it back. (And if you’re interested in renting smartwatches and other tech products, use code “expesewithlauren” to get a free month’s rental with Expese!)