Re: Smart watches should be simple
DrXym,
I'm not sure about that. I think the smartest design decision with smart wearables is to make them as dumb as you can get away with. You've already got a highly capable mobile computer within very short range (i.e. the phone) and it seems to me that the more work you can dump off on that, the better.
The downside of that is that you need the phone OSes to have common protocols and Apple and Google won't cooperate with that. Apple are far more restrictive of what apps are allowed to do too, so you may face problems with compatibility there. I seem to remember that my brother's Pebble did less because he had an iPhone than if he'd used an Android.
On the other hand, I do think some of the battery life concerns are over-played. Once battery life is longer than a weekend, it ought to be fine. If you're going away for longer, you're going to be taking chargers anyway - and you're likely to forget to charge a weekly/monthly watch and so run out of batteries frequently anyway. As most people take their watches off at night, surely you just need a nice little charging solution for the bedside table that can also charge your phone - and it'll soon become habit. We're all used to charging our smartphones every night after all? Most of us choose the flexibility of the smartphone over the long battery life of the dumb one.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
