Apple Watch: When I think about you, I digital touch myself Apple has released a series of videos to promote its wrist-puter ahead of its planned launch later this month. Cupertino showed off three different functions for its Watch product: messages, faces and digital touch. It teased fanbois that more reveals – such as phone calls, Apple Pay and Siri – were "coming soon". The Tim …
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"although the heartbeat thing is theoretically quite cute and romantic,..."
You can say theoretical, but I think Apple thinks it's a fact, thus will ultimately try to sell on this point. However, what if the thing is hacked and starts beating non-stop or in a hyper manner that could put an hypercondriac over the edge?
Going way out now....bear with me. What if companies bought they're way in and had some sort of control over the device (probably will). That's not far fetched, but what if every time you walked into a health store, the store set the watch to beat faster? Could they increase they're sales in any sort of way?
There is a certain amount of physical manipulation tied to devices such as these, great and small. With every added type of physical manipulation, the user slowly turns into a rat being nudge through a maze. It is a crappy watch, but some things sneak their way in on crap, later to become a standard for all things.
Anyways, yeh it's a crappy watch. Doesn't even look good. Reminds me of the early knock off plastic Casio's you'd see in Gold Circle/VanLeunens display cases. In fact, you still see these in places like T.J. Maxx and "Value" stores.
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I can tell you what's next. Check with an A&E surgeon if you know one. They will tell you exactly what is the most common communication object used for "communicating" so extensively that it ends stuck in an orifice and needs A&E attendance. Probably the stats are still valid till this day - Nokia 3xxx series. Right shape and right size ya know...
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@1980s_coder: as a committed fanboi, I of course started frothing at the mouth, and became more insulted by your post than Ive (geddit?) ever been in my life. However, imagine my embarrassment to find I accidentally upvoted you instead and can no longer wreak my revenge. Could you post again so I can put matters to rights?
Thank you in advance for your understanding.
Haha! Has the handle "The spectacularly refined chap" been taken? Most decent of you for asking, old sport - upvoted ;-)
On another note, not sure why my first post went down as 'AC' - I don't recall choosing that, (I don't use it), and IIRC it was originally non-AC when first posted - unless that was in memory bank 7 overnight and I've got it Asp about Thrace...
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"For example, fellow Watch wearers can be sent a tap pattern or even "rest two fingers on the screen to send your heartbeat, which your friend will also feel."
It strikes me as more like desperation because they've not managed to come with the "killer app" for smart watches yet. So they resort to cutesy "cool" instead.
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>they've not managed to come with the "killer app" for smart watches yet.
There was no single 'killer application' for the iPad either - just lots of quite useful ones, even in its clunky MK I version - yet is has sold well. Will the same be true of the Apple Watch? Possibly for some users, and possibly more if Apple Pay is adopted more widely.
I think I would personally find 80% of the utility in something that was 80% simpler - i.e, the most useful useful things like notifications and remote media controls don't require a large colour screen or powerful CPU.
What would be nice is if the Register had an article giving an overview of the smart/connected watch market at the moment, including the simpler fitness trackers, Casio Citizen and Sony watches, through Pebble and Martian, and up to Google Wear and, yes, Apple.
Interesting times.
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I wasn't proposing that a watch take on the same applications as bigger devices, but only that the sum of a few useful applications might prove to be as great as a single 'killer application'. Weighed up against the costs (money cost, size cost, charging up faffing around cost, aesthetic cost etc) of course.
So, the chief advantages of a watch are that is is quicker to look at than a phone, and it is always with you. Applications that present quick, simple information with little user interaction could be more appropriate to a watch than to a phone. Time and message notifications are the obvious examples, followed by direction headings if you are using it to navigate. More specialist watches already include direction, altitude and heart-rate.
Being always with you, a watch could also fill the role identifying you- which is what our bank cards, keys and passwords already do (the devil is of course in the details of the implementation... and the recent experiences of some car drivers doesn't instil confidence in previous 'wireless key' efforts). It can also be used to to find your phone.
Whilst user input on any watch-sized device is limited, it is superior for some applications. Example: I often rotate the bezel on my conventional analogue watch to remind me of when my parking ticket will expire or my food will be cooked. This takes me a couple of seconds, and doesn't involve me taking my phone out of my pocket, unlocking it it, navigating to the timer app and then entering some some numbers.
"Why should there be such a massive difference in price for the maintenance/repair of the gold watch as opposed to the aluminium version?"
Because Apple perceive a massive difference in the disposable income of those who might buy the different versions.
The digital crown is functionally a scroll wheel. Revolutionary.
And 'force touch' is the one finger salute equivalent of the middle mouse button on RISC OS (since the 1980s), or right click in Windows (since 1995) - it's calling up a context sensitive menu. Inspired.
I suppose it possibly is relatively new to Apple, though, after all those years of only having a single mouse button.
Who did what first doesn't affect the user experience. What makes a product good to use is more about which ingredients are included - or omitted - and how they work together.
Take the iPod - the form factor of a higher-end cassette Walkman with a wheel from a Bang and Olufsen telephone on the front (or a Sharp Minidisc player 722 if you want to stick to personal audio products). Neither element was new or novel, yet Apple beat the competition in marrying the two to a new Toshiba 1.8" HDD. Heck, Creative based a HDD MP3 player on the form factor of a personal CD player - they deserved to fail. Prior to that, Sony had done a lot of work with scroll wheels, on their professional AV editing equipment, and on their mobile phone OSs.
Macs have supported right-button-click since OS 8 in '97, and the Apple-key modifier since before then. Unix and RiscOS users might have wondered where the middle button had gone in Windows. My current mouse has quite a few more buttons that I use as modifiers (pan, rotate, zoom) which previously were assigned to F1, 2 and 3. Other modifiers (Shift, Ctrl, etc still require me to use the keyboard, and it's no effort, even when the modification changes upon the context).
The OS defaults don't really matter - people will fine tune individual applications to their will anyway (digitisers in Photoshop, Space Navigators in CAD, keyboard shortcuts everywhere, gamepads for games)
(I've never owned any Apple kit, but have used RiscOS, CAD on Unix and Windows, media players from Sharp, Sony and iRiver, and cameras from Panasonic and Sony. Logitech made my mouse. My Samsung tablet is in a drawer somewhere. My newest purchase was a combination camping lantern and flashlight with a pleasing user interface: a single button. Tap on, tap off. Hold to dim, hold to brighten. Double tap to switch between lantern and flashlight. Triple click to turn both on at once. After being turned off, it remembers its last state for ten minutes.)
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