My feelings about the Michael Bastian MB Chronowing are positive, but my larger feelings about the smartwatch segment are still reserved. I will be the first person to announce that “we have made it” with a truly appealing smartwatch that will be a good buy for most consumers. Smartwatches right now are products that do work, have some downsides, and that show incredible promise for the future.
This smartwatch differs greatly from Android Wear devices or the Apple Watch – but it’s an interesting approach nonetheless. It looks a lot more like a traditional watch than the aforementioned two, which could certainly have its place. The Apple Watch looks far too techy and computer-y to me (it’s essentially Apple cramming an iPhone onto your wrist, warts and all – the Windows PocketPC of smartwatches), whereas most Android Wear devices still need a lot of work (the bugs!).
This intermediate approach bridges the gap between a proper, classic watch and the techy stuff we see from Apple. This device sits on the classic watch end of the spectrum, whereas the Moto 360 sits closer to the modern end of the spectrum. The Apple Watch goes far beyond that, leaving the classic watch behind, trying to sell us a miniature smartphone on our wrists, just as Samsung is doing with the Gear S – with all the miniature, finnicky and convoluted controls that come with it.
I bought a Moto 360 last Saturday, and while I certainly like it – it’s a fascinating feat of engineering and a lot of fun to play with – I still fail to see the need for a miniature smartphone on your wrist. Android Wear allows for proper, full applications, but the display is just too small for these to be of any practical use. The notification stuff, however – the very centerpiece of Android Wear – is amazing, and you won’t realise until you wear one of these for a while just how liberating it is not to fumble around for your smartphone while out and about. For someone like me, who runs his own translation business and is always available to my clients, this is just great.
I don’t believe, however, that a smartwatch should do much more than handle notifications, which makes the application-centric approach of the Apple Watch so incredibly puzzling to me. But then, I’m guessing Apple is a lot smarter than me, and apparently they believe there’s a market for a tiny iPhone with finnicky applications and controls on your wrist.
I can’t wait to find out how this one pans out – which one will come out on top? Google’s minimalist approach, or Apple’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach?
“…just how liberating it is not to fumble around for your smartphone while out and about.”
I’m already liberated. I check my phone once or twice a week. Neither of mys sisters even owns a mobile phone.
Meanwhile, or in the real world, people have friends and family to talk to, and in many cases, a job to feed themselves. Without my phone, I cannot run my business. Without my business, I starve.
Not everyone can afford to be pretentious.
People under 35 may be shocked to know that people had jobs, friends and families long before mobile phones existed. In fact we humans have managed perfectly well without them for around 2.5 million years.
We pre-mobile oldies did crazy things like planning ahead and making appointments just to cope. In some extreme cases we even relied on our memories to function.
I cannot see any legitimate reason why your clients need to be able to contact you at any time. You’re an interpreter not the freaking POTUS or Head of Neurosurgery at a major hospital. No one is going to die if you take a couple of hours (or days) to respond to an email.
No, but I will lose that specific job, which could mean hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of euros.
Again – I’m glad you are wealthy enough not to have to care about that.
I am simply making the point that mobile phones have created a totally false sense of urgency. This means that people feel compelled to do non-urgent tasks immediately. Before mobile phones people would have called your home phone during business hours. If you weren’t there they would left a message on your answering machine or called back later. They certainly wouldn’t expect you to be available 24/7.
Napoleon Bonaparte used to wait 2-3 weeks before reading his mail because he knew that most problems would have sorted themselves out before he replied.
The local car dealers have the salespeople’s mobile numbers on display. What sane person rings up someone in the middle of the night to buy a car?
My work is not trivial. Thank you for considering my work to be trivial.
During business hours, yes, my clients expect me to be available. This has been that way for god knows how long – centuries, in fact. Even before phones, people expected shops and taverns and shit to be open during certain hours. This is no different. Again – you may be rich enough to not care about losing out on jobs, but I certainly am not.
I don’t have a home phone.
K.
I used the g watch r for a while and it ended up in the drawer, along with the pebble.
As Thom mentions, notifications is the most useful feature on a smart watch, but the thing is… I already have the phone and it makes a gentle vibration and sound when I do get a message. And when I have to reply, doing so on the phone is a must anyway.
So all in all, I find smart watches pretty useless in practice, and my wrist is free once again.
“I can’t wait to find out how this one pans out” – I can see a future where it’s fashionable to wear *huge* watches on your wrist that are essentially small smart phones. For those that laugh at the idea, try to picture yourself 5 years ago, and someone predicting 6″ ‘phablets’.
Actually, much as I hate them, the huge phones were easy to predict as soon as the small phones and portable media players gained the ability to watch commercial movies. It was only a matter of time before the screens got bigger and bigger.
Interesting take, but that doesn’t explain why movie playing isn’t limited to tablets. The screens rather quickly got bigger, just not the phone screens. And really, are there that many people watching movies on their phone?
Unfortunately, yes. Many of them don’t even have the common courtesy to use headphones while they do it. I’ve noticed it particularly among the teenage crowd in larger cities in the US. It used to be boomboxes, then music through their phone’s tiny speaker, and now it’s movies. Apparently it’s not so common in Europe from what I’ve been told by my friends who live there, and I don’t see nearly as much of it in Canada when I go there. No idea what the situation is anywhere else, but there are a lot of idiots in this country that do it.
Funny thing is, tablets generally got smaller. We went from the first really popular tablet, the iPad, to smaller android-based tablets to the point where even Apple made a smaller version despite their earlier assertions that they’d never do so. Unlike phones however, one can still pick their choice in tablet size if they want high-end hardware. These days if you want a flagship phone you’re gonna get a giant screen whether you want it or not. They all seem to have converged into anywhere from 5-8 inches, with 9-inch tablets and smaller phones making up a smaller portion of the product line.
I personally divide smartwatches in two categories.
On one hand you have the “useful” smartwatches: the Metawatch, the M1, the Pebble, and this new HP one (which from the pictures looks like a rebranded Metawatch).
They have monochromatic, high-contrast, always-on LCD screens. Their functionality varies but they all support notifications, widgets, remove music control, and have 1-week battery life.
On the other hand you have the “useless”/”gimmicky” smartwaches. These include all the Samsung Gears, all current Android Wear ones, and the iWatch. They have high-resolution, low visibility color screens.
The screens are NOT always on so you need to make stupid gestures to actually look at the time.
They are backlighted which makes them painful to wear on e.g. cinemas or virtually any formal event.
They contain useless sensors such as ultraviolet (where even a week-old _forecast_ done by someone competent is usually more precise than what you’ll get from the cheap sensor on the watch).
They use complex software which fails/crashes frequently.
Battery lifes are ridiculously small, and to top it off most of them are actually less featureful than, say, the Pebble.
Edited 2014-12-03 11:25 UTC
There does seem to be a truism developing that the “smarter” you try to make a smartwatch, the dumber it actually becomes.
It doesn’t need to do MUCH more than notifications. It would be great with a proper standard for notifications that any not so smart watch could implement, and the smarter watches could then add remote control for rejecting calls, controlling media player and similar stuff, plus optionally a microphone for voice control and some Dick Tracy style headset light functionality.
An ugly motherf***er. And what is _smart_ about it?
Since my last two comments have been deleted…
Why can’t companies market to successful gay men like any other demographic? If this watch had a style that appealed to teen girls and I said so I suppose that comment would be OK…
Edited 2014-12-03 14:49 UTC
We can’t really tell since your last comments were deleted, apparently. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if your comments where homophobic instead, if they actually were removed.
I guess was to late on my edit… I removed the homophobic bit. I was pissed and it was the wrong word.
Basically, I said the smartwatch has a nice design but… The “Michael Bastian” name plastered on the front, the back, and the wristband is ridiculous. This a very fashion looking type watch that will not appeal to most men (and not designed for woman at all). I am sure it may be popular with some successful gay men. Companies do market to certain demographics. It’s doubtful this was HP’s intent (they are known for stupid products decisions outside of printers) but never the less it’s not a design that will appeal to most men.
Edited 2014-12-03 15:01 UTC
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