What Apple's iWatch Can Learn From Pebble

redletterdave (2493036) writes "Many believe Apple's iWatch will marry the looks of a luxury wristwatch with the powerful sensors found in today's fitness wristbands, and, of course, familiar elements from the iPhone and iPad shrunken down and reconfigured to work from your wrist. Apple is undoubtedly full of its own ideas. But it would also benefit from looking at the progenitor of the modern smartwatch—or rather, its steely successor—both as inspiration and as a model to surpass."

Comments

e-ink display

[ArcadeMan]

Anyone knows if Pebble sells their e-ink displays to hobbyists?

Re:e-ink display

[xlsior]

Unlike their initial announcements, the Pebble doesn't actually use an actual e-ink display -- it's a 1.26 inch Sharp Memory LCD, also used by several other devices. http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/...

What Apple's iWatch Can Learn From Pebble

[QuasiSteve]

Nothing. Pebble clearly copied the iWatch and violates several of Apple's patents. :)

WTF? Pebble is not "progenitor"

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot believe I wasted my time reading TFA.

More than one year before the Pebble there was Metawatch (which uses exactly the same display type), and ages before the Pebble there were much, much more advanced "smartwatches".

Your Hatred, based on what?

[SuperKendall]

I find it the hight of irony that Apple would be so blatant in their copying of hardware and calling it "inspiration"

Do you find nothing rather silly about your remark given that Apple is not selling a smart-watch nor has said they are going to?

I mean, Apple-Haters have kind of ignored reality before, but never have stopped to the depths of complaint that something that doesn't even exist is not innovative.

Not a watch

[SuperKendall]

What's really funny is that Apple is likely not even working on a watch and the rest of you are going to seem rather silly going on at such lengths about something that does not and will not exist.

Re:Not a watch

[radarskiy]

No, they'll just switch to complaining about Apple's failure to deliver on their promise of an iWatch.

Re:Not a watch

[ahabswhale]

I use to own iPhones, and I never had a problem with using them as a phone. So, I don't really get your comment about them not working well as a phone. They even allowed you to access the browser and other apps while using it as a phone. Plus they had visual voice mail. In short, I completely disagree with your assessment.

Form factor

[Dan East]

I've said this in the past in regards to Glass, but I feel the watch is the ultimate form factor for wearable electronics. I feel that it should be the core of the mobile computing paradigm, once the technology has matured enough for that kind of miniaturization (mainly battery and WLAN). Then devices like Google Glass, and even the cell phone / tablet form factor, would all just be display and input / sensor peripherals for the core system (the watch). So in other words, I hope Apple gets it right (but most likely they won't - they'll probably go the same route as Samsung and make the device dependent upon an iPhone to do anything non-trivial).

Re:Form factor

[EmperorOfCanada]

Good science fiction generally had watches or something similar. Bad science fiction generally had Google glass.

Generally, not without exceptions, but generally.

Re:Form factor

[knarf]

No, it isn't. There is a reason I never replaced that watch I lost somewhere on a mountain in Switzerland - I always had to take the thing off because it was in the way. From building to logging to working the land on the farm to fixing the tractor to repairing the $random_piece_of_electronics to $insert_random_activity, the first thing I usually did was take of the watch and put it somewhere out of the way, both to save it from grievous harm as well as to save my arm from the results of getting the thing trapped in some piece of machinery.

Maybe watches work for desk jockeys? In that case it might be the ultimate form factor for *some* of the target group for wearable electronics, but not for everyone.

The optimal form factor for wearable electronics is a neural implant. Just don't forget the spam filter...

Three keys

[EmperorOfCanada]

There are three keys to a successful smart watch.

First is that it must focus on doing things that watches can do well. So the time, the date, alarms, etc.

Second is that it should not try to do anything that a watch is terrible at. Such as no making notes, text messaging, complicated mapping, etc.

But the last and more important thing is that it do something very phone friendly that way too cool. This would be something like having a navigation system where you enter your destination on some other device or by voice and then the phone shows very simple navigation cues such as vibrate when you should turn and simple arrows and other numbers. A map would just be stupid. The same with almost every other app. They must be extra simple. Focus on the quick check of the wrist vs any input.

This is very important. Data basically can not be input into this tiny device. It must be for quick data consumption only. The rule should be that if the data needs more than a glance then it shouldn't be coming from the watch.

Personally, at this point, I can't see the watch being much use as a stand alone device. It needs to be tied to a phone. But as batteries and electronics get better then an LTE version might be feasible. One of the most important things is that this thing not be a big bulky hassle.

One last ask of Apple; please don't put that stupid carousel interface in.

I will be curious how one will go about buying things for the watch. It almost certainly will have to be on a separate device. But maybe you could tell iCloud what you want sent to the watch and then it will go. But if it is paired to a device that must accompany it then it will be easy.

Re:Three keys

[rasmusbr]

They key is always going to be the software.

The way it might work in practice is you'll have "screens" that you can swipe between. The screens can be thought of as a list of information items listed in order of descending importance that you can swipe through The usefulness of this will depend entirely on the ability of the software to rank information by importance, which will be extremely dependent on the nature of the information and the current context that you're in. The problem of filtering and sorting information by order of importance is going to turn out to be very nontrivial.

I disagree, watch not optimal for many things

[SuperKendall]

I feel the watch is the ultimate form factor for wearable electronics.

Why though?

My feeling about the smart watch is pretty much summarized by this image of the ultimate smart watch.

I think of wearables in two senses - primarily sensor packages and quick but very limited information.

The watch is not in a great position for either of those things. For one thing it's often covered by sleeves, so the sensors to outside conditions get obscured and any visible notifications get booked too. Yes it can vibrate - but so can your phone. It's also moving pretty wildly compared to the rest of your body, so motion tracking on it is not going to be very good.

It can monitor a few physiological aspects of the wearer somewhat reliably, but that seems about it. I'm not even sure how well it would work for that - when I used to wear a watch many years ago, it always made my arm sweat under the watch which I'm pretty sure would throw some sensors off.

To me, a few things seem like better clothing items to make wearables:

1) Hats - in a great position to measure lots of stuff, and would be just as good as Glass at photo/video work, but could have a lot more battery capacity just because of the lager form factor that distributes weight better. Can also have fold-down display from brim and visual indicators just at the edge of eyesight.

2) Necklace - Pressing against the skin on your neck can measure some things that way, also more customizable in that battery packs could be the thing you attach to the end of the necklace and thus highly customizable.

3) Ring - very small but could have very subtle visual indicators as small LED's. Also positioned in a place that gets lots of data about what you are about to touch, or the environment in general (until covered by gloves)

4) Jackets - these are more specialized but have the form factor for larger batteries and interesting environmental sensors, or just way better antenna for things like GPS.

Even for desk jockeys not good

[SuperKendall]

Maybe watches work for desk jockeys?

I always found the strap was annoying when letting my wrists rest near a keyboard.

Watches also interfere with your sleeves when wearing a dress shirt.

Watches were fun for a while when I was young, but I never missed them after I started using my phone as a watch and it would take quite a bit of compelling reasons beyond what I see now to get me to wear a watch again.

Smartwatches have *1* purpose:

[jpellino]

To keep you connected to that company's other things. Let's face it - a smartwatch is way too small to actually do any useful work on - heck, most smartphones are a poor excuse for a full screen experience, productive work, etc. They mostly guide you to where you do the actual work. The smartwatch will be the next link further up that chain - to point you to the phone. Companies want you to have that thing on your wrist tie you to the rest of their product line. No surprise there. The only thing that may be attractive to people is that you don't need to keep looking at your phone, you just need to keep looking at your watch - which is still just about as offensive.