No Love From Ars For Samsung's New Smart Watch

Despite the number of companies shipping or promising them, smart watches aren't the easiest sell, and Ars Technica's review of Samsung's entry illustrates why. Despite all the processing power inside, the watch is "sluggish" even for the kind of at-a-glance convenience features that are touted as the reason to have a phone tethered to an (even smarter) phone, and for the most part seems to weakly imitate features already found on that phone. There are a few features called out as cool, like a media control app, but for the most part reviewer Rob Amadeo finds little compelling in the Galaxy Gear.

Is anyone surprised?

[0123456]

Hands up all those who've been desperately waiting for a 'smart watch' to stick on their wrist?

Yeah, thought not.

Wearable computing...

[larwe]

... is like home automation. It's always "just about to explode out of a niche market and go mainstream". Specifically to the wristwatch: this device has more or less ceased to fill its original segment of "functional timekeeping, optionally alarm-playing device that's always with you because it's on your wrist" - that functionality is filled by the cellphone, which is also always with you and has a lot more functionality. Watches these days are considered jewelry, not tools - you wear them occasionally to go with nice clothes to achieve a specific aesthetic effect. (This line of thinking is not original to me, by the way, I first heard it when reading some strategic marketing training materials, and have since heard the same story - with credible market research justifications, several times. It seems to pass the sniff test, especially once I walk down the street and look at a few hundred wrists to see what's on them). Given this, the market segment that actually finds the "80s calculator watch" aesthetic to be appealing is pretty limited, and I say that as someone who owned and loved my calculator watches, FM radio watch, "space invaders game" watch, and B&W TV watch in the 1980s. It certainly isn't close to the size of the cellphone market, by orders of magnitude. This whole activity of creating smartwatches is simply a saturated market flailing around to create the Next Big Thing. Throw some hardware out there, see if someone (probably a startup) comes up with a use case that sets the world on fire, acquire startup, profit. In the meantime, hype the widget and milk it for PR exposure time.

Missing the point, folks. It's not for you.

[Frosty Piss]

Folks, like many expensive watches, this is a fashion item, not a solution to any particular problem (other than how to fleas money from rich yups). Like a Rolex. It's jewelry.

Re: What if Apple..

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent point. Apple hints, companies shoot their wad, consumers are "yawn", Apple learns from consumer reaction, releases killer product, samsung pays for Apple's consumer research, silly samsung!

Re:What if Apple..

[Anonymous Coward]

Innovate anymore? When did Apple ever innovate? They didn't invent the concept of the PC, nor did they invent the GUI. They didn't invent the portable music player (those had been around for years), nor did they invent the smartphone. Truth be told, Apple has never created a completely new and untested product from scratch and been successful with it. They merely went into markets where existing products had major room for improvement, and then made the best version of that product that anyone had seen up until that point. It's an admirable skill, but I wouldn't call it innovation. Also, marketing. They have really good marketing.

Re:What if Apple..

[Anonymous Coward]

What you are suggesting--creating something completely new out of thin air--is "invention," not "innovation." There is a reason why we use two different words to describe these concepts.

Re:Wearable computing...

[hey!]

I disagree. It's lot quicker and easier to glance at my watch than it is to dig my smartphone out of my pocket and wake up the screen. For that matter living in New England, when it's winter I've got to figure out which pocket the phone's in.

What having a phone with you means is that it's no longer *compulsory* to have a watch for telling time. A watch is still a heck of a lot more convenient than a phone. I think that a phone companion watch that did caller id and notified me of incoming messages and upcoming appointments would be awesome, provided that it could go a couple days between charges. The Samsung device, I think, is a bit over an overreach; it tries to do too much and does some of it not so well.

I do agree that people aren't wearing watches as much as they used to. My daughter carries a pocket watch. One day at school she popped it open to check the time, and a girl asked, "What's that?"

"A pocket watch," daughter answers.

"What does it do?" the girl asks.

Re: What if NOTHING..

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't have to pay for fanboys like yourself.

Did you post on your FB about how Samsung "copied" the gold colour for their cases despite the announcement only being a reminder, and that other phones circa 2004 were also gold?

I lol'd when you say a lot of the other MP3 players out there were "terrible". Most of the people I know who don't have technical skill still "manage" to find and load music to their MP3 players. Just because it sold lots, means nothing. The iSeries devices are case and point: multitasking, copy-paste, fingerprint scanners, higher resolution / PPI displays, voice assistants, etc., were *ALL* done exactly the same way or extremely close to the same (and then surpassed shortly thereafter).

From X Windows wiki: "Several bitmap display systems preceded X. From Xerox came the Alto (1973) and the Star (1981). From Apollo Computer came Display Manager (1981) ... The Unix world had the Andrew Project (1982) and Rob Pike's Blit terminal (1982)." This, of course, excludes "W".

First personal computer? I laughed. See here: http://www.blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml (obviously some aren't really "personal computers" in the sense of today's definition), but the IBM 5100 introduced in September 1975. Expensive, but then a lot of people consider ithings expensive too. This, of course, excludes any home console systems which I perceive the iSeries devices to be, but could run selectable software of your choice. If you consider any iDevice a "personal computer" (even in tablet form), you must also define home consoles to be the same.

If you're talking about stylus-less phones, there were plenty of them -- of note, the LG Prada: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada , revealed in 2006. They were not the first, and they were not the only one. Capacitive screens just happened to become affordable at the time.

So I reiterate: "They don't have to pay for fanboys like yourself."