Wearables – Excited Pixels

Stop trying to sell me wrist-worn smartphones :

Everyone seems to be going down the same route of trying to shrink smart technology to the size of a watch instead of working to smarten up the watches we already have. It’s approaching the problem from the wrong direction, which might explain why the solutions we’ve seen so far have all been inadequate in some way or another. Mostly it’s about the size. Today’s smartwatches contain the best miniaturized technology available, but remain too large — even if they do try to patch over it with fine leather straps, polished metal designs, and gorgeous AMOLED screens.

It absolutely baffles me who, exactly, smart watches are being designed for. The notion that something would be buzzing on my wrist (in my own, very anecdotal case) hundreds of times a day as I receive email, retweets, LinkedIn invites, text messages, hangouts messages, and so forth is absolutely absurd. That’s noise that I want to avoid or minimize, not enhance and maximize.

I own one, very nice, watch that I wear on special circumstances. It’s beautiful and is powered by kinetic motions. It’s light enough that it doesn’t annoy the hell out of me, but heavy enough that it’s comfortable on my wrist. And, in all cases, it doesn’t beep, buzz, or otherwise interfere with my daily life.

To my mind, the ‘rationale’ for smart watches is really predicated on the absurd sizes that smartphones are reaching. With phones increasingly being sold with 5 inch, or larger, screens the devices are eyesores whenever they’re pulled out and their screens examined.

That’s a very, very bad rationale to build a product on and (to my mind) indicates the failure of smartphone design. And the solution that failure isn’t smart watches but more humane-sized phones.

We take a look at how Android Wear works, and even manage to break some stuff.

This is the most in-depth analysis that I’ve seen of the Android Wear API and functionality. I have doubts that predicating most/many of the ‘active’ uses of the Wearable through voice is going to be a super popular thing: I can’t recall the last time that I saw someone ask Siri a question, or used Google’s voice-based search. I’m sure that some people do engage in such behaviours, but I’ve never once seen it while riding public transit or walking around the cities I’ve visited or lived in. As a result, I’m left wondering: who is actually using voice-based commands to control their devices? And will expanding the kinds of devices that can receive such commands actually lead to mass changes in how people engage with technologies?

Source: In-depth with Android Wear, Google’s quantum leap of a smartwatch OS