Gadgets

The new Withings Activité smart watch is beautiful, unlike many of the other entrants to the market.

The first thing that stands out to me is how clearly different the approach to creating this product must have been. If you take Samsung, LG, or even Pebble (I’ll talk about Motorola in a moment) it is pretty obvious they started with a list of features and built the watch around it. Withings has undoubtedly started with a simple and timeless watch design and added intelligence to it. These two approaches are worlds apart.

Samsung isn’t exactly know for their design prowess or their honesty. They’ve been caught paying people to leave fake negative reviews on competitor’s products, they’ve been caught rigging their devices to perform better on benchmarks than they do in real life, and they’ve been caught stealing design cues from Apple (though rarely nicely implemented).

Side note: everyone in tech steals things from everyone else. There are a limited number of layouts, gestures, and features. There will be overlap. Don’t read into that one too much, I couldn’t resist posting a link to that Tumblr page.

Some interesting picks in here, definitely seems to capture the best products there. With that being said, I’m still not seeing anything that is standing out.

• Oculus Rift keeps making these kinds of lists, but it seems to be in a perpetual state of development.
• Sony Z1 Compact packs a top end punch into an iPhone-size device, a rarity for Android devices.
• There are a LOT of fitness trackers, I don’t see that changing any time soon.
• The Mother sensor system seems interesting. Not a grand slam, but a fresh take on smart home technology.

An excellent follow up piece (to his original post) on where Chromebooks fit into the tech world. Also read his link to Vance McAlister’s response, both are very insightful.

From Vance:

The true value in ChromeOS is what it DOESN’T have. Critics say “a Macbook or Windows laptop will give you the same Chrome browser, plus a lot more as well!”, but that misses the point entirely. Those laptops don’t come with the killer feature of ChromeOS: the LACK of a traditional OS.

John Gruber posted an interesting tweet yesterday regarding how important the aesthetic design of a product is:

We’ve always judged cell phones by how they look, and we keep them in our pockets. Wearables — glasses, watches, anything — can’t be ugly.

— John Gruber (@gruber) January 6, 2014

Of course, some folks aren’t interested in the design of a product, but in general it holds true. Some of the appeal of the iPhone is how stunning it is to look at. Part of the appeal of the Moto X is how clean and simple the design is while still being highly customizable.

I’m not saying it’ll never happen (though at this point I don’t see why they would), but this 2014 bigger iPad rumor is laughable. Not happening.

Regarding the larger iPhone… I see this being more of a potential, but the screen resolution situation would be a mess. I think if they do this, they’ll also introduce some API to make apps render with vectored graphics or something.

I suppose if BlackBerry exists in 2016, they just might be profitable. I sure wouldn’t bet on the former though.

I backed the Pebble Kickstarter project on day 3 and was anxious for all 471 days of my wait. There are pros and cons with it, I find myself wearing it for a month or so, then not for the next 3 weeks. Torn in between the two worlds. Plenty of reviews have been written, so I’ll skip that.

I found one shocking side effect of wearing the watch that I had not expected, and it remains one of the largest sticking points for me. It isn’t the Pebble’s fault though.

TechCrunch - The War For Your Wrist

I largely agree here. The smartwatch thing just isn’t there yet. I like my Pebble (I was an early Kickstarter backer) but it isn’t something I can’t live without. It is too thick, iOS is admittedly limited with these types of devices, and the 3rd party app support isn’t what I hoped it would be.  There is hope for the market, but it is going to be a while before this takes off.