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No Love From Ars For Samsung's New Smart Watch
Despite the number of companies shipping or promising them, smart watches aren't the easiest sell, and Ars Technica's review of Samsung's entry illustrates why. Despite all the processing power inside, the watch is "sluggish" even for the kind of at-a-glance convenience features that are touted as the reason to have a phone tethered to an (even smarter) phone, and for the most part seems to weakly imitate features already found on that phone. There are a few features called out as cool, like a media control app, but for the most part reviewer Rob Amadeo finds little compelling in the Galaxy Gear.
Was bluffing all this time, how ironic would it be if just the rumor of Apple coming out with this caused multiple vendors to blow all that R&D and production on a product no one really wants.
Hate Apple all you want, but there really is no substitute for being the king of the hill...
I was, and bought a Pebble. Damn close to everything I'd want, and definitely worth the price. Yeah, it would be nice to have a 'smart' watch but I don't think the battery and screen tech currently exists to do it right. The Pebble as a second, low-power, always-on screen with a few controls is pretty much the best available right now.
Hell, one of the advantages of even a dumb phone was that it had a clock on it. I threw out my watch the day I brought home my first cell phone. Why would I want a fragile piece of electronics on my wrist where it will just get bumped, damaged, and catch the hair on my wrists when I can keep something in my pocket? Watches are dead and good riddance.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Specifically to the wristwatch: this device has more or less ceased to fill its original segment of "functional timekeeping, optionally alarm-playing device that's always with you because it's on your wrist"
Believe it or not, I still wear a digital watch as well as have a smartphone. It's just quicker to glance at the time on it (which I do quite regularly) than take a few seconds taking out my smartphone from a pocket that also has keys in it.
I quite like the simplicity of the watch, though; a smartwatch kind of defeats the point.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Also, it's arguable that Samsung's stab at 'Smart Watch' utterly bungles the separation of labor in ways that make the result far less compelling than it could be(which, for the reasons you describe, is still somewhat limited).
.NET. .NET Micro runs on next to no resources (no 8-bit stuff; but the memory footprint is under 512k and the target architecture is ARM microcontrollers). .NET Compact is more capable; and of intermediate size, and then full .NET. All use the CLR, and run CIL bytecode applications, all are either quite similar to one another or subsets of one another, and so on.
.NET Micro device will run on just about the feeblest 32-bit ARM microcontrollers you can buy, and would support 'faces' and notification-processing/display engines on the CLR, with WCF-based communication with the handset. Want something a bit punchier? Compact is that, if you can satisfy its hardware requirements.
We have 'wearable computing', even your $100 'eh, some kind of android phone' that you get with prepaid plans is quite wearable, and pretty punchy computationally. Until we have the nigh-miraculuous/power density enough to blow your hand off battery tech to get the whole phone onto your wrist, that's where the compute power is going to have to live(there are a few novelty 'dumbphone-on-wrist' watches you can get, and they do work; but the only reason they get reasonable-ish battery life is because they are nth-generation minimalist GSM implementations cut to the bone).
Instead of recognizing this, and building just enough intelligence to save bandwidth by crunching and formatting messages (rather than using a less power efficient, relatively high speed, RF link to drive a 'dumb' framebuffer style screen or a relatively dumb RFB/VNC style screen), which would actually be doable in a smaller watch, or one with better battery life, or both, they dumped an entire cellphone in the thing, just one without the 'phone' part, or enough power to make Android pleasant, or enough battery to get good runtimes... Brilliant.
Ironically, Microsoft is probably best positioned (technologically, based on past behavior I'll give them a 90+ percent chance of either not doing it or fucking it up really badly) to do the 'smart watch'+ cellphone combo properly. They've been thinking about peripheral screens connected to more qualified systems since at least 'Windows Sideshow' debuted with Vista back in the day (uptake, approximately zero...) and they also have, for actual application support on the resource constrained peripheral devices, all the work they've done on
Again, MS being MS, they'll fuck this one up in some baffling fashion; but that's a very strong (relative to other companies' portfolios) set of options for building 'smart watch' type devices. Want a really watch-like smartwatch, possibly with adequate battery life? A
Outside of that, you have Samsung's rather pitiful 'take an entire Android phone and gimp it until it fits on your wrist' approach, or Pebble's 'do something totally custom; but more reasonable on resources, and provide a decently sane mechanism for developers to use when approaching your totally custom thing'.