431–440 of 534 posts
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I actually see this as a great fitness tracker (that is why I might buy it) but I don't see it as a smart watch (and I'm not complaining about that). In order to be a smart watch it would need to do more "smart" things such as showing notifications, interacting with third-party apps, etc. If you have a Windows Phone you can talk to cortana so it's the closest thing to a smart phone you can get on that OS, but still i…
I think it does show notifications.
The smart watches out there are big and flashy, like most watches for men. I am a heterosexual male, but I find the large watch faces to be immodest. I certainly do want to show off with a watch, but in a more subtle way. And I am not a really big person so the large watch faces don't fit my anatomy that well.
So I actually want my smart watch to look like a smart band and act like a real smart phone (to the degree that is possible).
How is an integrated GPS cutting edge? Polar has had watches with GPS for a while now..
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This is going to sound silly but here's my thing: the Band is built around receiving notifications, that means that even if you disable them, you'll still see text message icons, emails, etc. even if you can't use them. I want to look at my watch and see "hey, you've walked 30,000 steps today", not "you know, you can check all this crap on here!". It's the concept, and it's also that mental reminder that you MAY have…
Actually, I think the psychological weight of both notifications and infoglut in general is a very valid concern, but I think making crazy assumptions / rants is silly. Case in point, what if I told you not only can you turn off the notifications completely (which we established earlier), and that no notification icons show up on the main screen (which is obvious from the video/screen shots - we're not talking about…
I'd love to hear more about what you like about it and how it is. My main concern was basically not having yet another phone-like device that will annoy the crap out of me. And the Band is begging for it.
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It's ugly, but if I were in the market for a smartwatch/fitness tracker this might be the only one I'd bother with. As I find myself saying more and more, I love this new Microsoft. It's insane how much harm a single man can do.
Ugly? For me it's one of the best designs for a smartwatch (I think Samsung or Sony also have this "band" design), not the big clunky watches that were released this year.
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It's ugly, but if I were in the market for a smartwatch/fitness tracker this might be the only one I'd bother with. As I find myself saying more and more, I love this new Microsoft. It's insane how much harm a single man can do.
I actually see this as a great fitness tracker (that is why I might buy it) but I don't see it as a smart watch (and I'm not complaining about that). In order to be a smart watch it would need to do more "smart" things such as showing notifications, interacting with third-party apps, etc. If you have a Windows Phone you can talk to cortana so it's the closest thing to a smart phone you can get on that OS, but still i…
What do you mean? What is it that they do that this will not do? I think Microsoft should have just marketed it as a watch. To me it seems to have everything I will need in a smartwatch.
I certainly would not want a bracelet that tracks so much information from a corporation that is known to cooperate with the NSA. The bracelets they force repeat sex offenders to wear track less information about them. The only way I would consider using such a device was if both the hardware and software were available for public review.
Thanks you, I had to scroll down a fair bit to see someone point this out. I am with you, I wouldn't wear one if they paid me. The data they are harvesting is a lot more valuable than the service they are providing. I am sure health insurance companies are salivating at the opportunity to buy this data. Even if the data is anonymous.
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Our runtime is straight ANSI C. No comment on anything else mentioned:)
If you also use libevent, I win! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8532192 Congratulations for this btw. I'm not an MS fan, but I hope this works for you guys!
Our software was completely written from the ground up. We started with an empty main.c file. :)
A number of us lead software engineers are on hacker news and we all love the latest programming languages. We got a bunch of really super cool stuff in here, but all in straight C and running in very little memory space. We're dying to start an engineering blog, we believe some of the lessons we learned about applying modern software engineering techniques to an embedded device are very valuable. (Fun fact! Embedded Engineers have been avoiding dynamic allocation well before it was cool!)
We're hoping to get proper continuations in sometime soon. :) Our main problem is saving/restoring the stack without losing too much performance! (Cycles equal battery life, I cannot justify pushing for a move to continuations if the battery life hit is noticeable to the user!)
in general, I'm a pretty big MS fanboy (win phones since 7, surface 2, etc). And I am suspect of the category as a whole, but the orientation of the screen just seems so dumb. Also, people keep saying it is so small, it certainly doesn't look like it to me, especially on the sides it looks relatively thick. I'm going to be out in Redmond soon, hope to see some in the wild.
> but the orientation of the screen just seems so dumb. I thought this at first but after thinking about it I think it's really intuitive! When you use a watch you have to turn your arm in a non-natural way but when you turn your palm up it's actually easier because of the way the mussels are laid out. Also that's how you always look at your phone. I wouldn't mind trying one out.
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If you also use libevent, I win! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8532192 Congratulations for this btw. I'm not an MS fan, but I hope this works for you guys!
Thanks for the congrats! Our software was completely written from the ground up. We started with an empty main.c file. :) A number of us lead software engineers are on hacker news and we all love the latest programming languages. We got a bunch of really super cool stuff in here, but all in straight C and running in very little memory space. We're dying to start an engineering blog, we believe some of the lessons we…
I hope you get your dev blog approved :)