Microsoft Apparently Developing Smartwatch

Watches became unpopular when everyone started carrying around cell phones. I still wear a watch, but I'd rather it be able to withstand hitting something and not breaking (unlike most phones these days, my watch has been hit and beaten up over the years and it works just fine) and I only need mine to tell the time. I could be wrong, but I don't see the market for it.
 
I hate to say this, but you are wrong. There's going to be a huge market for it. Watches will display time/date/messages/emails/facebook & twitter updates/control music. People are going to buy them by the truckfuls.
This proves it: Pebble: E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android by Pebble Technology — Kickstarter Asked for $100K got $10M. Reached $1M in just over a day.


If/when Apple releases theirs and if/when Android and Windows Phone get their own, they will be hugely popular and they will be worn by a whole lot of people. They may even start to be bundled with certain phones are sold as add-ons to go along with flagship phones.
 
Last edited:
IMHO it is still guesswork, but I tend to agree with jmacavali. Watches are inherently mobile devices that people have grown used to for many, many decades. With the right recipe, this is going to be bigger than smartphones.
 
Eh, whatever. I just didn't see that because so many people abandoned watches when they started using their phones as a way to keep time. I personally like my watch and would be lost without it, but I wouldn't get a smart watch. If they are any bit as fragile as smart phones, it will be broken within 6 months. If I wanted to use my phone I'd just pull out my phone, it's got a bigger screen. :rolleyes:
 
If the market trends of tablet sales going up and computer sales going down, then we can assume that screen size does not matter. It's all about getting the content to the end user as fast and as conveniently as possible. Watches (and all "wearable" technology for that matter) will take the delivery speed another half step forward.
 

Attachments

  • icontacts-comic.jpg
    icontacts-comic.jpg
    106.7 KB · Views: 11
Last edited:
If the market trends of tablet sales going up and computer sales going down, then we can assume that screen size does not matter. It's all about getting the content to the end user as fast and as conveniently as possible. Watches (and all "wearable" technology for that matter) will take the delivery speed another half step forward.

Can't say I agree. Look at smartphones. They're getting larger with every generation. The largest a watch could possibly be without becoming really obtrusive would be about 1.5 inches diagonally. That's really small. It'll end up being more convenient to just take out your phone if whatever content you're trying to read is more than a sentence or two. And you can forget about any sort of practical text entry on such a device. The only option would be voice-to-text, which is pretty terrible most of the time. So basically, you have a device that's useless for pretty much everything except alerting you when you get a message and displaying the time. Even as a watch, it's a failure. Who wants a watch with a hard to read screen, that needs to be recharged every couple days? I know I don't.

Honestly, I wouldn't be too surprised if they release something like this. And people will buy it, initially at least. Once people realize that it actually makes tasks less convenient, it'll quickly die out. I'd be surprised if they last more than two years before being discontinued entirely.



That "pebble" watch posted above seems somewhat more practical, for certain uses at least. E-ink won't completely destroy the battery just by displaying the time, and it's actually readable in sunlight. The GPS functions seem like a good idea, but the fact that it's tethered to a smartphone would make me very hesitant to actually use them. In the photos, they have a person riding a bike and jogging with it. Personally, I'd never even consider bringing a $600+ phone when doing such activities.

Just my thoughts on the matter.
 
Last edited:
I didn't even think about recharging it. That would be a hassle. My regular watch has solar recharging. I don't even get out in the sun a whole lot and the charge has never dropped from high in three years. Even with solar recharging on one of those, the battery just won't last like a regular watch. I do kinda agree, it's a new tech that people will buy initially until they find that it really doesn't help any. Just because I can read small things doesn't mean I want to either.
 
I was a PDA user when they first came out. Battery life was typically 7-10 days before recharge (excellent by today's standards?). Had to learn special gestures to write out the words with a tiny pen too small for my hand. Very good scheduling system. This was one of the first mobile devices.

Did it hit it off? No, not really. At one point I actually could not transfer data out of PDA easily because the idea of mobile devices pretty much just died. People thought, hey, we gave it a try, but who would want to actually work on one of these small screens? Let's go back to notebooks and PC. This was before Kindle and such BTW, so people used to read books on PDA, too (or tried to, anyway).

I also owned an MD player when it first came out. The record function is still better than most mobile devices out there. It had good storage media, which were easily stackable, with reasonable storage space (at that time), etc. But it never hit it off.

I also studied immunology in grad school. I was told that the studies of immunology practically stopped for two decades before advancements were made again, simply because people couldn't study at cellular level, which was changed with flow cytometry.

I think (again, guesswork), contrary to what was suggested, smartwatch will not hit it off initially. The right sort of combination will have to be achieved after a few tries for it to work for the general public -- combination that we just don't get, just yet, at this point in time. And then some improvement in another field, probably seemingly unrelated at this point, would affect smartwatch and make it work.

Or maybe we should just skip a few steps and go for positronic brain implants. :D
 
Can't say I agree. Look at smartphones. They're getting larger with every generation. The largest a watch could possibly be without becoming really obtrusive would be about 1.5 inches diagonally. That's really small. It'll end up being more convenient to just take out your phone if whatever content you're trying to read is more than a sentence or two. And you can forget about any sort of practical text entry on such a device. The only option would be voice-to-text, which is pretty terrible most of the time. So basically, you have a device that's useless for pretty much everything except alerting you when you get a message and displaying the time. Even as a watch, it's a failure. Who wants a watch with a hard to read screen, that needs to be recharged every couple days? I know I don't.

Honestly, I wouldn't be too surprised if they release something like this. And people will buy it, initially at least. Once people realize that it actually makes tasks less convenient, it'll quickly die out. I'd be surprised if they last more than two years before being discontinued entirely.

That "pebble" watch posted above seems somewhat more practical, for certain uses at least. E-ink won't completely destroy the battery just by displaying the time, and it's actually readable in sunlight. The GPS functions seem like a good idea, but the fact that it's tethered to a smartphone would make me very hesitant to actually use them. In the photos, they have a person riding a bike and jogging with it. Personally, I'd never even consider bringing a $600+ phone when doing such activities.

Just my thoughts on the matter.



They are getting bigger but I think people are looking for a happy medium between phones and tablets. It will even off once people are happy with a size.

I think it's important to look at smartphones like everyone else does, "throw-away". Very few people actually buy them at retail price and instead get the discounts and trash them for two years and then replace them.

I think of my phone and all the alerts that I get that would show up on my watch instead of having to get out my phone....emails, messages, Facebook messages, ESPN alerts, 2 other sports apps alerts, several different multiplayer game alerts...plus I can control my music. It would save me time because I don't have to get my phone out or have it right with me at home or at work.

I don't care about charging. I would take it off at night anyway so no big deal just to plug it in too.

They aren't made for data creation only data delivery.


Again, just some thoughts. I almost bought the pebble when I first saw it.
 
Back
Top Bottom