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Android Wear Is Here
An anonymous reader writes with this breakdown and comparison of the first two Android Wear watches available today. The first two watches built on the Android Wear platform launch today. One is from LG, the G Watch, and the other is from its arch Korean peninsular rival, Samsung, the Gear Live. Should you buy one today? Maybe. It depends on how early you like to adopt. Let's take a quick trip through analysis lane. First, let's talk about Android Wear, because both watches run on the same platform, and both of them have more or less the same software. Android Wear really does two main things, it moves app notifications to the watch's face, and it puts Google Now's voice-powered search capabilities on your wrist. That's about it. But that's pretty powerful.
call me when a charge lasts a week or so. So long as I have to charge it every day I'l keep my solar powered radio synced watch which has told me the time for the last 5 years without having to touch it.
...instead of you reading them when you feel like, and they need ot be recharged every day. For $200. WOW!
I don't think this will pick up tbh, there is a little social experiment you can perform, in a crowd ask people who are wearing watches to put their hands up, you'll find its mostly the older people who wear watches. I haven't worn a watch (34) since I was 23.
>> Maybe. It depends on how early you like to adopt. That's about it. But that's pretty powerful.
Your writing style. Is the suck.
Why the hell are they so fixated on using Displays? Give it an e-paper face and be done with it - you get "always on" and better battery live. And even monochrome displays can be made to look beautiful
IMO, of course.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Are these water-resistant? I wash my hands a lot and would hate to throw $200 away on a watch that's going to die a quick death when exposed to a little water.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Being square was like so 60's. I want round watches which don't resemble 80's Timex wrist calculators.
Wear?
Here. Android is where? Here! Where's here? Exactly!
Here we go again. Let's just skip ahead to the arguments made every time there's a story about smart watches. Please note that the exclamation point at the end of each argument is the indicator that THIS argument is right, and everyone else is a moron.
1. Nobody wears watches anymore, they are just jewelry!
1a. These are too cheap and ugly to count as jewelry. I only wear a $180000 dollar watch to show off how awesome I am!
1b. I wear a watch, because I hate pulling my cell phone out of my pocket!
2. These are dumb, the charge doesn't last long enough to be useful.
2a. My $5 watch from 1993 never needs to be charged!
2b. My $180000 watch doesn't have a battery, it is wound by a servant that comes into my room every night to care for the watch!
3. They aren't rugged/waterproof enough!
3a. Neither is your $1800000 jewelry watch!
3b. I don't care what happens to my $5 watch, but it keeps on working, what about these?
3c. I regularly go scuba diving, parachuting, race car driving, and enjoying fine wine on my yacht. That's when I'm not busy having great sex twice a day. This watch won't work for me!
4. I don't want to be MORE plugged in! What happened to just getting away from all your notifications and enjoying life?
Ok, now that we've gotten those out of the way, is there any NEW discussion about these things, or should we just move on?
Google play required to use android wear. No chance in hell.
He's just ahead of you on the learning curve.
"For example, both SMS and email will let you send a reply right from your wrist. (And this is true of both Gmail and the Android Gmail client.) Admittedly, these work best in short bursts. 'Yes.' 'No.' 'Thanks.' 'I got it.'"
He's seen the future. It's short.
I don't know, I always thought that Dick Tracy looked kind of ridiculous talking to his watch.
Why would anyone want to strap a watch to their wrist if it's not picking up heart rate, body temp, movement, etc... If it just has Android functionality, I already have a HTC One M8 that can do everything it does and more. I'll stick with my Basis smart watch until I can get the health tracking and the Android functionality in the same package.
you can now buy a watch every one to two years.
C'mon. There are three broad categories of watch people these days:
1. The "I have a phone, so why do I need a watch?" category. Most people under 30 are here.
2. The "My watch is the measure of my style." category. They either view watches as cheap and disposable (watch as fashion statement), or expensive and long-lasting (watch as jewelry or mark of status). Who among these will buy a $100-$200 device that will be obsolete every couple of years?
3. The "My watch tells me the time without fuss and hassle" category. These people buy watches that last, but don't really want to think much about it. It needs to tell time, and perhaps have an alarm. They don't want to charge it every day. (I'm in this category. My Casio G-shock cost $40 5 years ago. I've changed its battery once. Otherwise, it requires no maintenance.)
I don't know which of these people these Android watches appeal to. What possible advantage does a tiny display on an expensive item offer that really beats out what your basic smartphone can do, and which is still required in the equation?
I'll wait for this.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
From the Kirk. School. Of writing.
No brain, no pain.
* This post bought to you by the Apple Marketing Team
I remember people said the same about smartphones. Waah, the battery only lasts a day, I'll never use one of those. Somehow smartphones still took over the world. People do go to sleep every night - a nice cordless charging stand seems like a relatively small issue if the devices are genuinely useful.
But the smartphone allowed people to do things they couldn't already do. The smartwatch allows them to.... not take their smartphone out of their pocket. That's it, its a subset of all the functionality of their phone, and it doesn't do most of them that well. There's nothing compelling about them.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
...I tried to get some useful tip on how to grow corn at home.
It came up with - how to GET PORN at home.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
You only can achieve year-long battery lifes with devices that just show time and don't do much else. It would be utterly impossible with an Android smartwatch like this, unless great advancements happen in technology. But indeed the current 1 day-battery life of that thing is kind of crusty. Even the manually-winded mechanical watches have more runtime. And to think about how the battery life drops even more over time as the battery ages (although modern Li-Pol batteries are increasingly better in this regard).
With rigorous innovating and careful engineering we could push the battery life from the current 1 day to 2 weeks.
Not everyone takes their watch off at night. I don't. It comes off my wrist for what is probably about 30 to 40 minutes or so cumulatively a week, which is about how much time I spend in the shower.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
wear is it?
Be or ben't
WTF are you smoking? I've used phones with Cyanogenmod and custom ROM's etc for years and have no problems at all with the Play store.
The tech industry has been flirting with smart watches and the like for years now, despite nearly all of the market research showing that people generally aren't excited about it. At all. The whole reason people stopped wearing actual watches was because they started carrying phones with them, rendering the watch redundant. I think the industry knows it's bleeding itself dry with smartphones since they can't keep making them bigger (which is largely how they have kept prices up), and tablets have proven to be too limited in scope to necessitate frequent upgrades (my 10" android from 3 years ago still does what I bought it to do). I just don't see this market blossoming at all, but I guess all the manufacturers are afraid of missing the boat on the Next Big Thing so they're pouring money into wearables anyway. Which means we'll probably have to deal with 3 to 5 years of crappy or niche devices being hyped up by paid reviewers and pro sponsors, until a bean counter somewhere says enough is enough.
Charge it every day == no.
Leaving aside the part of my brain that is trying to figure out whether you consider only a few showers a week acceptable or are just really fast about them, I've never understood the point of non-waterproof watches. The extra cost is trivial these days, and you don't have to worry about them in the rain, or the shower, or washing your hands, or swimming, or cooking, or... you get the idea. Granted, not everybody needs a watch good to 50m - I'm a SCUBA diver, but I have a dive computer so the watch is somewhat superfluous while diving - but you can get ones good for 10m (33' or so, about one extra atmosphere of pressure) easily enough. The last time I had a watch I had to take off when bathing I was... 8?
I do still have to take the thing off at the damn TSA checkpoints, but that's the only times I have taken it off for years now. I think the battery is about eight years old?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Leaving aside the part of my brain that is trying to figure out whether you consider only a few showers a week acceptable or are just really fast about them
If you're male and have the expected short hair, showers shouldn't take more than 5 min each (x7 = 35m), perhaps another 5 if you shave in the shower. Or are you from the Lester Burnham [1] school of showering? Regardless, still shouldn't take more than 1-2 min more.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
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Cool, a new platform!
And, as with previous platforms I'm sure they'll focus on security, privacy, stability, usability as well as allowing the user to easily have control over their own system.
Whoops, sorry, just noticed the OS in the title was "Android." Never mind.
Normal replacable batteries in a watch? I was under the impression that automatic quartz watches ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... ) had taken over the market. Of cause they do have rechable batteries or a capacitor, you just don't replace it.
No one needs a watch any more because cellphones have built-in clocks. People may wear them as status symbols (Patek Philippe or something), but no one needs a watch.
...wait, wait, wait hear me out.
I work in a BSL2+ lab where obviously I can't take my phone out and answer calls etc. But what I've always wanted is a notification band that is relatively low profile, that I can wear on the inside of my wrist. I just need it to let me know who is calling and scroll SMS messages so that I can tell if it is an emergency that needs to be addressed immediately. It takes a bit of time to de-gown and decontaminate before leaving the lab to deal with missed calls and I tend to waste a bit of time during the day replying to calls and SMS messages that were just not that urgent. It's only a matter of time before it'll be possible to get a 5-day working week out of the battery life and hopefully the construction will handle decontamination with mild disinfectants. I'm very close to giving the Galaxy Gear Fit a try as it seems to be close what I'm looking for, but I'm not so sure about battery life. It doesn't seem to be getting good reviews either. I'll be getting something eventually, but I think it's going to take a little longer for manufacturers to iron out the kinks. Cheers.
I have ordered the "Neptune Pine", delivery is promised for next week.
I don't go swimming with an iPhone either.
the tablet allows them to ... not open their laptop? that's it. subset of the functionality of their laptop, and it doesn't do [the functionality] well since it has a smaller screen and a slower processor. there's nothing compelling about them.
the tablet allows them to ... not open their laptop?
Yes, because it's a lot easier to bring a tablet with you than a laptop. So you may well have a tablet around when there is no laptop to open.
The same is not true of any modern smart watch, which by design only really does much when a smart-phone is in your pocket.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm unsure why the part of your brain that figures I shower infrequently (evidently deduced from the weekly total that I cited) can't figure out that I usually only spend 4 or 5 minutes to take a shower in the first place.
I have a waterproof watch and it wouldn't be harmed by the shower, but if I wore it in the shower all the time, then I couldn't effectively wash my skin under the watchstrap. Since I don't tend to take my watch off otherwise, dead skin would build up underneath it, and it would get rather disgusting in short order.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
but it's not easier to bring a tablet and a laptop than to just bring a laptop, right?
No, but it is easier to bring just a laptop than a tablet. Any USB source charges it. You can carry it more easily, and use it in more places.
since a laptop does everything a tablet does
Not actually true (touch interface far better for things like drawing) but let's pretend it is.
A laptop may be able to do everything a tablet does but if the tablet is far lighter and has better batter life guess which most people would rather have on a trip?
In a foreign country would you rather wander around looking for a WiFi cafe with a tablet tucked in your purse, or a backpack with a laptop?
This is exactly why tablets have done as well as they have, because they replace laptops for some scenarios where portability is more convenient.
i'm in BT range of my phone 99% of the day, and i think that's pretty typical.
And I'm in quick viewing range of my phone 99% of my day, which is also typical. They are the same thing...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From TFA: "On the other hand, the Samsung watch is the clear winner on overall build quality."
From reality: http://www.androidpolice.com/2...
That's right - it's been only 2 weeks or so since Google I/O and Samsung devices are ALREADY breaking with multiple reports of the same failure mode.
In addition, there are frequent reports of display corruption that doesn't happen with the LG: https://plus.google.com/+Artem...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?