Google Reportedly Making a Smartwatch, Too 196
judgecorp writes "With Samsung and (reportedly) Apple already making smartwatches, Google has now joined the party, according to a (paywalled) report in the Financial Times. The Google Watch is apparently being made by the Android group, and could have some synergy with Google's other wearable tech — the Glass spectacles. The distinctive thing in Google's patent seems to be having two displays — one for public data and a flip-up one for more private stuff."
Re:The average Slashdotter . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm trying to grok the distinction between a phone and a watch that makes a phone a legitimate tool and a watch idiotic. Obviously, if the weight or battery life is sufficiently poor, there's a real problem for a watch, but other than that, what's the difference?
Re:Watch! (Score:4, Interesting)
Sigh. Time to raid the kid's college fund again.
Imagining the possibilities (Score:5, Interesting)
I can think of lots of applications for a device attached to your body, and telling time is far down on that list.
(Since I work mostly within view of computers I haven't worn a watch in my professional life ever. Nowadays with smartphones, the need is even less.)
Can bone conduction work with a watch-like device? You could hear your phone ring without disturbing anyone else, and if you could identify the ringtone you could tell how important the call is.
Would body measurements be useful? Heartbeat, temperature and blood oxygenation seem obvious. Would it help your doctor rule out certain diseases to know the characteristics of the fever - spiky/continuous, low/high level, exact date of onset?
Could the device make fitness measurements? Tell how much exercise you're getting per week, let you know when to get out more and which type of exercise best meets your goals?
If there's an embedded accelerometer, can the instrument detect tossing/turning at night? With the blood oxygenation, could it detect sleep apnea? Snoring? Other sleep disorders?
Could the device detect dust levels in the manner of a [non-radioactive] smoke detector? Would this be useful for people to monitor their allergies?
I once worked with a scientist at Berman Gund laboratories (Boston) who was amazed [at the time] that you could put a microprocessor on a lanyard connected to a light sensor mounted on the patient's eyeglasses. He wanted to see if the progression of Retinitis Pigmentosa correlated with the amount of light entering the patient's eyes.
Light sensors [google.com] are now cheap and tiny.
Does the amount of light in a user's environment correlate with depression? With SAD? Does fluorescent light correlate with depression? Does brightness matter or total daily duration?
Will it have a GPS receiver? Could it display an arrow and distance information?
Lots of applications here. Telling time is almost an afterthought.
Re:Watch! (Score:4, Interesting)
My "smart watch" performs basic watch features (the time, stopwatch, alarms) as well as altitude, relative atmospheric pressure, temperature (can't be on the wrist for that), and a compass.
Smart enough, and it basically lasts forever as it is solar powered enough.
Re:Watch! (Score:4, Interesting)
Until recently I had no tablet because I had no need for one. But recently I bought a refurb. Nexus 7 for $162, because since having a baby, I need to be where the baby is. For the 3 months after he was born I had pretty much no access to electronics outside of work. If I want to consume some content, the phone is too small, laptop too clunky, and desktop is somewhere else in the house.
Thus the tablet is a perfect fit, it serves up the content at an ideal screen size as I walk around the house, and is held in one hand (especially important!), and serves as the video baby monitor I can take with me around the house.
Tablets had no purpose in my home...until they did.
Watches are probably going to be a harder sell. Possibly useful as a hands-free extension for smartphones, but I'm not a heavy phone user (living on a 150mb per month data cap), so it'll take a long time for me to find a use for a smart watch. But I'm sure there are plenty of people who can make use of them.
Re:is there just NO originality anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
> (and the Prada's original UI was vastly inferior).
And isn't that kind of part of the point? There were smartphones around for years before the iPhone came out, but they all sucked horribly. I struggled to do any kind of Internet browsing with my Blackberry Pearl to do the kinds of things that I can do on my iPhone just by talking to it. I had a geek friend who was so proud of his Windows phone that had a stylus. I remember another had an iPaq that could play movies. There were also tablets before the iPad, but no one wanted to use them either. And in both cases, any competition lagged well behind Apple in terms of being able to come up with a product that anyone actually wanted to use.
Apple knows how to make products that people want to actually use. No one else can seem to figure that out without waiting to see what Apple does and copying that.