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Apple Watch – What can you do with it?

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Re: Apple Watch – What can you do with it?

#111

Post by istvan__ »

jonknee wrote: post #84
istvan__ wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, in a world that is focused on productivity (aka deliver asap something even if it is partially broken) and not too much of quality, this can happen very easily.

ASAP? The watch had been in progress for many years and was even announced and demonstrated publicly 7 months before it started to ship. It was definitely not rushed out the door.

Sorry I was focused more on the making process than the actual product. This happens with software more often than with hardware. I started to work as a hardware test engineer back in the day, and I know how hard is to deliver something without problems like this.

Re: Apple Watch – What can you do with it?

#112

Post by frik »

danso wrote: post #13

It's pretty exciting to anticipate how developers might do innovative things with the Watch...but until then, I'm pretty bearish of the device as something of real utility. It's not just the particulars of Apple's execution and implementation, but just that the physical form factor of a watch inherently limits it...and the coolest things we've seen watches do in fiction, such as Dick Tracy's wrist-walkie-talkie, are…

Apple Watch v1 is a first step. I am pretty sure v2 will be huge. (akin to iPhone2 aka 3G, and iPad2)

For certain occasions like doing outdoor sport, an inbuilt low-power 2G phone modem would be awesome, so that one can use it without a smartphone in the pocket. One can also imagine an improved Siri app. Both combined with a improved battery that lasts 2+ days would be an instant buy.

Re: Apple Watch – What can you do with it?

#113

Post by frik »

gdubs wrote: post #42
pmontra wrote: post #26

"Your Apple Watch app acts like a separate process running on a separate device, however behind the scenes the OS runs a ‘skeleton’ like version of your host application on the user's iPhone and the Apple Watch extension in tandem, both on the iPhone" I totally missed this limitation until now. So the iWatch works only if you have an iPhone and the phone is in communication range with the watch? What can the watch st…

You can still go on a run, for example, without the phone and listen to a few gigs worth of music. There's apparently a bit of machine learning that allows the watch to do all of its health metrics on your run, once it has gotten to know your patterns.

Maybe Apple can add a low-power GSM/2G phone modem to Apple Watch v2. Then one could do outdoor sport without carrying a smartphone in the pocket.

Re: Apple Watch – What can you do with it?

#114

Post by swombat »

julianpye wrote: post #47
res0nat0r wrote: post #20

Apparently you can't do a lot of things with it if you have tattoos on your wrist: http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/344b3o/anyone_with_ta...

This kind of reminds me of the 'Better off Ted' episode, where the company's new motion detection system does not detect any of the African Americans in the office.

Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ

Re: Apple Watch – What can you do with it?

#115

Post by orbitur »

JohnBooty wrote: post #88
orbitur wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No GPS though. I was hoping the watch would at least have that so I didn't have to put up with Garmin's terrible software anymore. Maybe rev. 2.

I've never seen a sleek, tiny watch that had GPS. The Fitbit Surge is the smallest I've seen and it's still pretty huge - more like a bracelet than a watch. Pictures of it on actual wrists here: http://www.cnet.com/news/fitbit-charge-charge-hr-and-surge-h... I don't know the nuts and bolts details but I think GPS has power/size requirements that preclude it from fitting in the size of something like a "normal" watch,…

Well, the watch isn't all that tiny, and Garmin does make a line of GPS watches similar in size to the 38mm watch.

I have no comment on accuracy, as I bought the expensive and much larger Forerunner 910XT. The current top of the line Garmin is the Fenix 3, which again is similarly-sized.

Re: Apple Watch – What can you do with it?

#116

Post by JoblessWonder »

chimeracoder wrote: post #66
julianpye wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of reminds me of the 'Better off Ted' episode, where the company's new motion detection system does not detect any of the African Americans in the office.

> This kind of reminds me of the 'Better off Ted' episode, where the company's new motion detection system does not detect any of the African Americans in the office. Which is itself a reference to real-life results involving motion detection/computer vision/image processing (this was a particularly bad problem in the earlier days of the field, but still persists today to some extent).

Here is a great video showing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM

I think I just like their banter.

Re: Apple Watch – What can you do with it?

#117

Post by c1sc0 »

nasalgoat wrote: post #58
threeseed wrote: post #8

Every restriction that Apple made makes total sense for the short/medium term. Watch faces need to be impeccably programmed or are likely to dramatically reduce battery life (some of the existing ones use OpenGL). Developers shouldn't be redefining the behaviour of force touch or digital crown before users have had a chance to properly learn them and access to heart rate surely had FDA implications. Tim Cook has stat…

Keep in mind that all the Watch apps had to made exclusively on simulators until the watch itself was publicly available. Once we had a watch we discovered tons of bugs that didn't show up before.

I'm trying to do something to help with that at www.watchtesters.com

Re: Apple Watch – What can you do with it?

#118

Post by drzaiusapelord »

elorant wrote: post #76
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling that the Apple of old would have caught this instantly, when it was largely the boutique brand for creatives. Today's Apple? Not surprising at all.

The Apple of old almost went bankrupt.

For a long time they were incredibly successful while Woz and Jobs were active.

Re: Apple Watch – What can you do with it?

#119

Post by jsz0 »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #23

>Can I build a watch face? No Wow, really? I just built a watch face from a photo of my son on Android using some app. It took 2 minutes. I was expecting Apple to do this better; not block the functionality. >Can I access the users Heart Rate? No. This is bewildering. You'd think support for third party health apps would be a priority. This works on AW right now. This product seems rushed. I guess Apple didn't want A…

> This product seems rushed

Apple is almost always conservative with the feature set of software shipping on first-generation devices. Maybe they learned an important lesson in the 1990s about the dangers of not building on a solid foundation.

Re: Apple Watch – What can you do with it?

#120

Post by greglindahl »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #69
edgyswingset wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple of old (and by that I mean Steve Jobs) decided to tell people they were holding their phones wrong rather than launch a device which worked no matter how you held it.

No I mean a 80s and 90s hacker culture where weirdos were valued and guys with tats would be testing things. Apple today just seems way too button down, for good or bad.

Not only do you need a tat, but you need a tat covering the skin under the watch that's done with metallic ink. What fraction of people with tats have such a tattoo? I have a lot of friends with tats, but none that meet those criteria.
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