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Google Glass Is Dead, Long Live Google Glass
DumbSwede writes BBC reports on the demise of Google Glass as we know it:
Google Glass sales halted but firm says kit is not dead. One can only assume there will be dissatisfied early adopters and developers given Google's decision. Here is to hoping Google Glass 2.0 (assuming there is one) will be better received. The Verge expands a bit on the re-org that the linked BBC article mentions, as a result of which Google Glass moves from the Google X incubator to its own division: Google's announcing today Glass is "graduating" from the Google X experimental projects incubator to become its own independent division — a division that will report into Nest's Tony Fadell. Current Glass head Ivy Ross will retain day-to-day authority, but she'll report to Fadell. Nest itself will remain separate and independent, and Tony will still be in charge there as well.
sigh, please use computer terminology correctly. this is slashdot.
"vapourware" is software which has been advertised and marketed, or demonstrated with a prototype, and yet never fully completed or released.
Google Glass is real, completed, and released.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean you can use incorrect terms to describe it. Why not also call it a pizza, since it's not a pizza?
The Pebble does not use E Ink, it uses Sharp's Memory LCD crap. An E Ink display uses no power unless the display is refreshed. Memory LCD uses power constantly. I would have thought you'd know that as someone who "owns" a Pebble.
Five days of battery is terrible for a watch. A smartwatch with an E Ink display could last a lot longer.
I wrote some stuff responding to your attempt to rile me up, and it amused me intensely, at your expense, then I deleted it so you can't even reply to it. So thank you.
But I'm not going to stop trying to be helpful.
As it happens, the screen on the Pebble is a form of e-ink. It isn't the same oil-cell bubble technology used in many e-readers (including the one I "own") but it's marketed as e-paper because it's got many of the benefits of traditional e-ink while simultaneously not having most of the shortcomings of straight LCD. What, specifically, does that mean? Well, for instance it's fully transflective, meaning that it's perfectly viewable in daylight conditions (atypical for most LCDs).
Also, as designed, the display pulls very little power to maintain a given display. What pulls power is altering the display - as with traditional e-ink - but this too is addressed with admirable cleverness; it's designed so it doesn't refresh the entire screen, only horizontal lines that contain altering content. So with a watchface that isn't wasteful, you may only be redrawing a fraction of the screen at a time, leaving most of the display at maintenance pull. Traditional e-ink redraws the entire display each draw, and usually does so a total of three times; once to solid black, once to solid white, and once to draw the desired content, all to deal with the memory effect that traditional e-ink has. It's not actually a given than traditional oil-cell-based e-ink would actually net longer battery life.
Finally, the Pebble's screen is capable of a much higher refresh rate than traditional e-ink, so that non-watch applications can have smooth display. Admittedly, the vast majority of the time a user only redraws a portion of the screen once per second, but the capacity is there.
As for battery life, yes, five days is excrementally poor for a watch. Strangely, for a smartwatch it's not at all poor. I - an admittedly small sample of exactly one - find it no chore to find one night a week that I don't sleep with the Pebble on, so it can charge. Every other night of the week I wear it as usual, allowing it to wake me in the morning as my traditional digital watches have for the last... oh... nearly four decades. It also bears mentioning that the method the Pebble uses to get attention is vibration, not audible sound. At first I didn't know if I would like that, but in the end I've come to prefer it. Of course, physical movement is also battery-expensive, so that's another factor to keep in mind when comparing battery life to traditional watches; they just beep.
Dismiss the product if you will. Not everything is for everyone, but the Pebble is in a completely different category from every other smartwatch on the market in pretty much every way. Not expensive, not huge, waterproof, doesn't have a silly battery-intensive colour display. It's a very capable companion product that augments an existing device instead of trying to weirdly replace it.
"Oh no... he found the