iWatch / Wearable tech

[MegaZoid.]

Yeah those watches are far to feminine , they look like bangles, defo not unisex.
I want a watch to look like a watch otherwise people will think im wearing a bangle, some new age hippy bracelette thing or some kind of fiteness tracker, i dont want that.

[Deckard]

Dash earbuds are a huge jump forward in earphone technology. They manage to cram in wireless Bluetooth 4.0 aptX connectivity, 4GB storage, touch sensitive controls, and fitness tracking including heart rate and oxygen level monitoring.

Dash is currently on Kickstarter, where it's already smashing the target goal. The buds offer passive noice cancelling but also active listening if, for example, you're cycling in traffic. They even track your activity by measuring your heart rate, oxygen saturation, pace, cadence, distance, steps and more - reading them back to you in real-time.

Very funky indeed, if they deliver

[RiK]

Yeah, because they're definitely not going to fall out and get lost somewhere in the woods on a trail run...

[Baggypants]

Yeah, because they're definitely not going to fall out and get lost somewhere in the woods on a trail run...

Easy to fix, wear some headphones over them to stop them falling out.

[Deckard]

New Samsung Galaxy gear - would half the market even touch this ugly thing - that is women ? Most interesting is the move away from Android but I still feel that looking like a watch is not the way Apple will go. Nice of Samsung to dump on the people who bought v1 just a few months ago.

[Misfit]

Now this is suddenly a bit more like it. The Moto 360 with the new Android Wear OS....

[Deckard]

Looks better but convince me that I need it - Currently I am looking or talking to a device that replicates my phone functions (and needs my phone) on a smaller screen and needs charging daily. How is this helping my life ?

From MacRumours yesterday

Google just video-launched a product that doesn't even exist. You don't even know if the round-watch device has a 20 minute battery life or a 2 hour battery life. For all we know, you don't even know if it was CGI magic with a round hunk of metal that created that video.

Google loves vapor/paper-launching. As always, there were no release dates, and no actual products launched that you can use today (forget the alpha SDK, anyone who has developed for Android knows what a nightmare it is to develop cross-platform code on there).

If I were you, I would go buy some more Apple shares today. There is still one company in the world who waits and waits, and only open its mouth and releases something when it's not vapor-ware. When you can actually go buy it in the next few weeks. When you can actually start using it. When you know.. it actually matters.

Google launched this so when Apple releases an actual working, purchasable product, they can anchor back to this video and say: "Look, we're not copying Apple! We're innovators! We were first! We're a giant university of idea-men! We've got tons of ideas! Ideas as we all know are worth 100000x more than execution!!! We are Google!!! The innovation capital of the google-verse. All bow to our vapor-novation"


Google is just an ad company that has a ton of money to run vapor-ware science experiments with.

(P.S. I also think you should buy some Google shares, they're going to keep rocking the advertisement/data world)

[Misfit]

Looks better but convince me that I need it - Currently I am looking or talking to a device that replicates my phone functions (and needs my phone) on a smaller screen and needs charging daily. How is this helping my life ?

It's a fair point but there is much in tech we don't need.

If the watch faces are as high resolution as they look, then I'd love just have the flexibility to change them all the time regardless of the rest. You have that on the pebble, but they don't look real.

From people who do use things like the pebble, the idea of getting notifications and being able to check/ignore them without having to get your phone out is apparently quite liberating and I do like the map idea. I've often wandered the streets of London and keep having to turn on my phone to check the map (at least iOS has it on the lock screen now).

Obvious problem for me with this one is that it's Android and I'm still in the iOS land, so it's got to be really special to consider a move (and it won't be).

Unless Android Wear is some independent OS that can work with other bluetooth devices of course. But that seems more than unlikely! Must read up on it.

[Misfit]

Oh, and the biggest like about this is that it is round.

Not round with a square screen in the middle, but really round. You know, like almost every watch on the planet...

[Cloudane]

I've seen a Gear and they look very nice (technically, not necessarily fashionably). However I am not the slightest bit interested in supporting a product that is designed to lock you in to a specific manufacturer of phone - especially in the case of Android where they have no "compatibility" excuses. I'll keep my nice monochrome and camera-free but interoperable Pebble, thank you!

[RiK]

Looks better but convince me that I need it - Currently I am looking or talking to a device that replicates my phone functions (and needs my phone) on a smaller screen and needs charging daily. How is this helping my life ?

That's the crux of it for me, it doesn't add anything I can't do on my phone, and if I've got to take it off to charge it every day it's never going to work. There's too much bloody tech to charge already.

That one looks massive too, way too big and clunky, which is always going to be a problem unless something radical happens with battery tech.

[The Caffeine Kid]

Is this turning phones into servers where you have a watch or other wearable as a client?

Are our phones going to end up even more featureless slabs, maybe even without screens because people will use something else as the interface? I guess that is one way things could go anyway.

[zip accident]

Is this turning phones into servers where you have a watch or other wearable as a client?

Are our phones going to end up even more featureless slabs, maybe even without screens because people will use something else as the interface? I guess that is one way things could go anyway.

That sounds like a desktop with a net connection to your wearable to me. Having a remote personal server, a carried server, and a wearable UI sounds redundant, and if you don't back-up at home, where will your backups go when your provider has a headfit?

[Whiteball]

Put photos of the kids faces on the watch then when you look at it at work thinking 'is that all the time is' you're instantly boosted by their cheery smiling face and forget you've only just really started another long day at the office....

[fog]

Aside from the cool tech factor, are these watches addressing any particular need or are they still looking for some killer feature as a reason to exist?

I can't think of anything notable they would do that would persuade me to get one right now.