No Love From Ars For Samsung's New Smart Watch 236
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.
What if Apple.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Was bluffing all this time, how ironic would it be if just the rumor of Apple coming out with this caused multiple vendors to blow all that R&D and production on a product no one really wants.
Hate Apple all you want, but there really is no substitute for being the king of the hill...
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
I was, and bought a Pebble. Damn close to everything I'd want, and definitely worth the price. Yeah, it would be nice to have a 'smart' watch but I don't think the battery and screen tech currently exists to do it right. The Pebble as a second, low-power, always-on screen with a few controls is pretty much the best available right now.
Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score:2, Interesting)
Hell, one of the advantages of even a dumb phone was that it had a clock on it. I threw out my watch the day I brought home my first cell phone. Why would I want a fragile piece of electronics on my wrist where it will just get bumped, damaged, and catch the hair on my wrists when I can keep something in my pocket? Watches are dead and good riddance.
Re:Wearable computing... (Score:5, Interesting)
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"
Believe it or not, I still wear a digital watch as well as have a smartphone. It's just quicker to glance at the time on it (which I do quite regularly) than take a few seconds taking out my smartphone from a pocket that also has keys in it.
I quite like the simplicity of the watch, though; a smartwatch kind of defeats the point.
Re:Wearable computing... (Score:5, Interesting)
We have 'wearable computing', even your $100 'eh, some kind of android phone' that you get with prepaid plans is quite wearable, and pretty punchy computationally. Until we have the nigh-miraculuous/power density enough to blow your hand off battery tech to get the whole phone onto your wrist, that's where the compute power is going to have to live(there are a few novelty 'dumbphone-on-wrist' watches you can get, and they do work; but the only reason they get reasonable-ish battery life is because they are nth-generation minimalist GSM implementations cut to the bone).
Instead of recognizing this, and building just enough intelligence to save bandwidth by crunching and formatting messages (rather than using a less power efficient, relatively high speed, RF link to drive a 'dumb' framebuffer style screen or a relatively dumb RFB/VNC style screen), which would actually be doable in a smaller watch, or one with better battery life, or both, they dumped an entire cellphone in the thing, just one without the 'phone' part, or enough power to make Android pleasant, or enough battery to get good runtimes... Brilliant.
Ironically, Microsoft is probably best positioned (technologically, based on past behavior I'll give them a 90+ percent chance of either not doing it or fucking it up really badly) to do the 'smart watch'+ cellphone combo properly. They've been thinking about peripheral screens connected to more qualified systems since at least 'Windows Sideshow' debuted with Vista back in the day (uptake, approximately zero...) and they also have, for actual application support on the resource constrained peripheral devices, all the work they've done on
Again, MS being MS, they'll fuck this one up in some baffling fashion; but that's a very strong (relative to other companies' portfolios) set of options for building 'smart watch' type devices. Want a really watch-like smartwatch, possibly with adequate battery life? A
Outside of that, you have Samsung's rather pitiful 'take an entire Android phone and gimp it until it fits on your wrist' approach, or Pebble's 'do something totally custom; but more reasonable on resources, and provide a decently sane mechanism for developers to use when approaching your totally custom thing'.
Re: What if Apple.. (Score:2, Interesting)
"When did Apple ever innovate? "
Please learn the difference between innovation and invention.
And FYI : Apple owns many many thousands of patents.
"They didn't invent the concept of the PC"
Oh quite the opposite. They did exactly that. The Apple ][ was the very first PC. What you think of a PC was scrambled together by IBM with leftovers in a hurry when they saw the wild success of the Apple ][.
Apple ][ was released in 1977. 3 years before the IBM PC.
", nor did they invent the GUI. "
They did indeed invent the modern, working GUI.
The concept they bought from Xerox was not completely developed and lacked many key features. It was not really usable.
The first usable GUI computer was indeed the Macintosh in 1984 when all others used CLI.
"They didn't invent the portable music player (those had been around for years), "
No. But they innovated A LOT. Guess why the iPod captured 77% of the market in an instant and never dropped below that level.
Have you seen one of the train wrecks they sold back then? Like the Nomad. Plain awful. MP3 players only became mainstream due to the iPod.
"nor did they invent the smartphone. "
No. But just like the iPod there was a time before the iPhone and one after the iPhone. They innovated what a smartphone is. Not with a stylus and resistive display, no more plasticky keys.
"Truth be told, Apple has never created a completely new and untested product from scratch and been successful with it. "
Wrong. Just plain wrong. Your bias and lack of knowledge is showing.
". It's an admirable skill, but I wouldn't call it innovation. "
But exactly that IS innovation. Improving a product substantially is the epitome of innovation.
"Also, marketing. They have really good marketing."
Their marketing budget is tiny compared to MS or Samsung.
Re: What if Apple.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Excellent point. Apple hints, companies shoot their wad, consumers are "yawn",
Except Apple aren't king of the hill any more, they have less than 20% of the smartphone market.
And they've repeatedly missed the boat on what smartphone buyers really want. Copy-paste, big screens, folders, notifications, etc etc.
Of late, Apple has done well at recognising a game-changing technology (1.8" HDDs, capacitative screens etc) early and releasing a niche-defining product based on it before everyone else. They can then ride the first mover advantage into the growth phase of the category.
That's not the situation with smart watches. There has been a steady trickle of smart watches on the market since the '80s, and I have no doubt there'll be (some) demand for a good one. But Apple be playing in a far more aware field and will have to take their chances just like anybody else.