Bought my first Smart Watch (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

That's was a great CG-rendered concept video. I look forward to your review of actual hardware, if it really exists.

 

[DaveF]

The Verge likes the moto 360http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/5/6108947/moto-360-review

 

[Sam Posten]

The review is riddled with excuses and caveats from someone who desperately wants smart watches to be more cool and useful then they actually are currently. It has to be charged every 12 hours and: A few months in, there’s still really not that much you can do with Android Wear. Yeah that's advice worth following.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Just a few more days till we find out if Apple is able to do something better.

 

[DaveF]

I'm curious what Apple will do. Google's approach with Google Now voice control seems like a good long term plan for these tiny-screen devices. And the consensus seems that Google Now is ahead of Siri.But I still don't know what the real raison d'être for smart watches is. In her moto 360 review, Joanna Stern repeats the refrain that fitness and health are the killer apps yet to be implemented. I suppose...but I don't get it yet. After the initial fad, is pulse monitoring really a killer app? Not for me. Is step-counting a killer app? Meh.I think that inactionable data collection is not that big a deal. And if smartphones are betting the business on that, they won't amount to anything more than niche products like the Polar heart rate monitors for exercise enthusiasts.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Dave,

Just getting a taste of my Samsung Live, I really love the concept.

Just to be able to keep my phone in my pocket and be able to glance at all the
most important notifications by just turning my wrist forward.

I don't have any need for its fitness implementation at this time.

 

[DaveF]

Ars seems to like the moto 360 design, but denigrates its tech.http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/moto-360-review-beautiful-outside-ugly-inside/

 

[Sam Posten]

So did you back the Kairos on Indigogo Ron?

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kairos-t-band-smartwatch-best-of-analog-digital


In the meantime since your post they raised their initial funding goal but jettisoned the whole point of the watch which was to have the display over the watch crystal and made it a cheesy looking side panel on the band.

 

[Hanson]

Ironically, the Apple Watch may be the shot in the arm that Android watches needed. I can imagine a lot of people looking for the Apple Watch only to find out it's not compatible with their Android phone and discovering that the Moto 360 is less than half the price. It will be interesting when Google releases iOS compatibility for Android Wear.

The reviews for the Apple Watch are rather muted. But it could have been worse -- if Samsung had released a smartwatch that was slow, took longer to tell you the time than if you had taken your phone out of your pocket and had a complicated control system, it would have been slagged off the planet. In that context, the reviews for the Apple Watch have been more than kind.