Tag: Smartwatch

I have a smartwatch, and I will admit that I am tired of the big digital thing on my wrist. It’s not very cool to look at. I really like the idea of this Origin watch from Grayton.

When your carotid arteries are set to explode in just a matter of hours, time becomes very important to you. You really need a way to keep track of your remaining time. This officially-licensed timepiece is based on the band Snake Plissken wore to countdown until he drops dead in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York.

If you are a parent and have an electronic wearable that you keep on most of the time, I can guarantee that at one point or another your child has wanted to try it out. Garmin has unveiled a fitness tracker for kids that can also help encourage them to do chores.

I thought smartwatches were pretty smart already. I love not having to dig my phone out of my pocket to see who is calling and if I want to talk to them. Thanks to a new technology that was developed by scientists at Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University, smartwatches are set to get lots smarter.

Almost exactly a year ago, I talked about a modular smartwatch idea that was in the works called Blocks. What we didn’t know at the time was exactly when the product would come to market. A year later, you can now order the Blocks modular smartwatch and we know when the watch is supposed to ship.

For the longest time, I thought of Microsoft primarily as a software company. But over the last couple of years, they’ve released some really good hardware that can keep up with the best players in the market.

We’ve seen many ideas for devices with flexible displays, but a company called Polyera claims that it will commercially launch such a device next year. It’s called the Wove Band, a smartwatch with an E-ink touchscreen running nearly the length of its entire strap.

I’ve had the opportunity to try out a number of smartwatches and fitness trackers in the last couple of years, and while there are a handful that work as advertised, I’ve had several complete duds as well.

We’ve known what the Apple Watch would look like for a while now, and now Apple has finally revealed all of the details we’ve been waiting for, including pricing for every version, as well as the features slated for its April launch.

I don’t think smartwatches are as useful as they’re cracked up to be, but I also didn’t expect that they could be another way to express one’s geekiness. That’s all thanks to user made skins for Android watches, like njdom24’s sweet Codec skin.

If you like watches, you probably have strong feelings about smartwatches. On one hand, you’re probably in favor of watches that do as much as possible, even if it’s not something you’d use (what lunar phase is it?), but on the other hand, an electronic device is so far divorced from most of the elements of horology that you love.

Smartwatches are cool, mostly because they fulfill our sci-fi fantasies, instead of for any practical reasons, but they’re not without flaws. Most of them, as far as watches go, are pretty bloody ugly. The Motorola Moto 360 isn’t bad, and Apple’s entry into the field is beautiful, even if it is made by a pretentious company that designs its products to be near-impossible to repair.

It wasn’t long ago that I was thinking about how a purpose-built gaming smartwatch could incorporate a controller without being a bulky and annoying POS. Depending on how responsive this is, we might have an answer with this prototype watch that was designed by students at Carnegie Mellon University.

One of the things that annoys me about consumer electronics is that we all know within a few months something better is going to come along and most of us will end up with buyer’s remorse.

Smartwatches are imminent, but they’re not quite useful enough yet to have become any more than a niche product for hardcore tech geeks, much like Google Glass. Personally, if I were to drop a few hundred dollars on a watch, it would be an analog watch that will be in style for roughly a century, not a tech piece that will be made obsolete in a few months.

A couple of weeks ago we saw how Android apps can be made to run on desktop operating systems, including Windows. Corbin Davenport did the reverse, installing Windows 95 on his Android Wear-powered Samsung Gear Live.