Can Even Apple Make a Watch Insanely Smart? 196
theodp writes "Throwing some cold water on the buzz surrounding the Galaxy Gear Smartwatch launch, The New Yorker's Matt Buchanan questions how smart a watch can really be. Calling offerings like the Galaxy Gear useful but not the stuff of dreams and revolutions, Buchanan writes, 'So there remains a strange undercurrent of hope that somebody-Apple-will figure out, soon, some grander vision for wearable technology, transforming it from something that people have vaguely imagined into something people intensely desire. It did it for smartphones, once, and again, for tablets. The question that Apple has been charged with, since nobody has definitively answered it yet, is whether the lack of an invention that truly carries us beyond the last five hundred years of wrist-mounted technology is the result of a failure of imagination or simply a fact of nature-that a watch will always just be a watch, no matter how smart it might think it is.' So, will you be an early adopter and drink Samsung's or Sony's smartwatch Kool-Aid, wait to see what Apple comes up with, or hold out for a Windows Forearm Pad 8?"
Wait (Score:1, Informative)
I'll wait to see what Apple (or anyone else) comes out with but I don't hold out much hope for any of them - seems like a lost cause. The marginal increase in convenience from having it on your wrist compared to taking it out of your pocket just doesn't counter the decrease in display size and functionality compared to a phone. Even if it was extremely low cost, if I have the phone with me anyway, why bother with the watch?
Re:Wait (Score:4, Informative)
Most of those things you mentioned fail for the watch use case though.
Contact-less payments are a nightmare - the possibility of an unintentional scan is pretty damn high. Ah you say, but you'll require you to authenticate - well ok, but now you've turned a one-handed action (remove phone from pocket, press "allow" and swipe) into a two-handed action (hold hand against scanner, use other hand to press "allow" on the watch face").
The Watch is a really terrible form factor for pretty much anything that's not passive, because there is no possible way to control it with the hand of the arm it's worn on - it takes things which only need one hand on your smart phone to implicitly involving two.
Re:Already Got One (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Another Fail (Score:4, Informative)
Wrist watches is a technology only about 100 years old
Patek Philippe created the first wristwatch in 1868 for Countess Koscowicz of Hungary. [wikipedia.org], so 145 years.
That said, the smartass reporter did some research; Wearable watches date back about 500 years, but they appear to have been worn as necklaces (Flavor-Flav in the 16th century yo) rather than on the wrist. He just confused wearable with wrist-mounted.