Pebble Smartwatch: The why and why not

There’s a new project on Kickstarter, the wildly popular crowdfunding website. It’s called Pebble and it’s breaking some records. The goal of the project to get started was $100,000 and as of the writing of this post, the project has  $6,193,523 of funding pledged from people.
The watch, made with an e-paper display, the same display that the basic line of Kindle devices uses, is extremely customizable, correctly priced (at $150, it’s the same as the Sony smartwatch and probably does more) and as you can see from the Kickstarter page, has gained the love of 42,000 early bird backers.
https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/597507018
Sounds awesome doesn’t it?

No.
Yes, it’s got great features like an amazing choice of apps, analog or digital or typographic watch face, Android remote SMS, email and phone call notifications (iOS doesn’t support those features yet), caller ID, accelerometer based functionality, an ARM processor for near-infinite modding capabilities, bluetooth and even a 7-day battery life (ZOMG!), but all these features are over shadowed by one tiny detail –
E-Paper.
The watch and it’s entire ecosystem is based on the concept that you are using it in the day(light)!
Remember how irritating it is when you want to read from your Kindle but the light is just not enough to let you read? Remember how that wonderful afternoon in the sun with your favorite books turned sour as soon as evening hit the valley?
That’s what’s gonna happen with the Pebble smart watch over and over again. You’ll need to find just that spot that works. You’ll have to move to the only light in the room as soon as a phone call comes in, just so that you can read the caller ID before you decide what to do with the call.
What I’ve pointed out doesn’t seem to be of much concern to those funding the watch, in fact, when I tried to explain this issue to someone on twitter, I got it handed to me on a platter! (Apologies @mcowger if you didn’t want to be highlighted!)
http://twitter.theinfo.org/190114510063935488
I’m not saying don’t buy the watch. In fact, if you’ve got the dough, put it in right now before the project funding stops on May 18th. You’ll even get the watch cheaper than market price ($99 instead of $150) so it really is a good deal, just make sure you switch on the lights in your bedroom before you look at your watch at night!
After-note: The Pebble manufacturers added a back-light to the watch to combat the useless-in-the-night issue, probably as an afterthought, so, I as an afterthought, am going to talk about the Sony smart watch that came out the same time as the Pebble project was launched. Don’t be surprised because it’s called Smartwatch or that it runs Android. Or the fact that despite being technically superior than Pebble (multi-touch color OLED display), it’s going to sell much less.
http://www.sonymobile.com/us/products/accessories/smartwatch/
That’s all folks!
N

Birthday Musings

As I leave another birthday behind, my head is pounding and my body is sleep deprived. I realize that I’ve not slept comfortably last night and that I should have.

My mind wanders towards those older times when, as a kid, I used to sleep at 10-10:30 PM on April 3rd and did not get up before 7 AM on the 4th. I’d be greeted by my family and wished a Happy Birthday. Then I’d go to school, a bright smile on my face, and take care of the events of the day. When I came back from school, we’d have a party with all of my friends.

What changed? Remaining awake till after 12 midnight became a habit. Then, celebrating the beginning of my birthday became a habit. This, in turn, led to a habit of sleeping late and getting up late and what follows is a cycle of watery eyes and burning foreheads. I realize now, how sleeping on time, waking up on time and going through the day before celebrating the happy occasion was a great idea, not just for me, but also for my parents. The world works on fixed schedules. There are no special off days for individuals, just holidays for everyone. Time and tide wait for none.

Perhaps, I should go back to that model. Perhaps, in this fast paced world of Facebook notifications and instant messaging, it is a good idea to unplug from that connected life at the right time of the night and drift into a peaceful sleep. Perhaps I need to stop attending the midnight masses.

Or, maybe not. There’s plenty of time to grow up. Now’s probably not it. 🙂

Wall Gardens on the Internet

There’s a lot of talk about sharing and being social on the Internet. Well, the trends say otherwise.

 

I recently wrote about how sharing is dying because of the numerous social networks. It seems that people want to share more but privacy concerns and the changing model of social networks is not allowing that anymore. I almost wish we were back to the “Have a webpage, will talk to the world” times.
http://nitinkhanna.com/sharing-but-no-joy/
Validation for this comes from an unexpected corner. A conversation between a few networking professionals on twitter was about this very topic. The irony of the situation – the way twitter is modeled right now, I saw any part of that conversation only because I follow each an every one of those individuals involved in the conversation.
The whole discussion revolves around the idea that the Internet itself is getting more social. Everyone is trying to create social networks around their products and this is fragmenting the concept of true sharing on the Internet, which at one time was all about hosting a webpage where your thoughts were readable by anyone who knew the URL. To add to this fragmentation, the concerns that every country’s government is having about the privacy of their citizens are causing those social networks to be more closed than open.  In the above tweet, @EtherealMind has a very important point. The Internet was pretty social before these social networks came along. I guess the only point I’m making is that if you really want to be social on the Internet, start a blog, post on it and tell your friends to tell their friends about it.

The new iPad is out. It’s not enough!

I followed the launch of the new iPad and I’m not satisfied with it. Apparently others aren’t too.

The iPad update has come through. And it wasn’t a great big awesome update. No it’s not. Here are some clips from the internet about it…

http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/tablets/ipad-3-rumours-what-you-need-to-know-937498
http://www.apple.com/ipad/
http://twitter.com/Macworld/status/177463719293501440

Update March 2019: I was using the Storify plugin to create visual links to all the URLs above, but I am no longer using Storify. So please click the links above to check them out.

OnLive Desktop

I was one of the first to check out the OnLive Desktop app for the iPad that techies all over USA are just discovering.

I am not truly impressed. I’ve been using TeamViewer’s excellent free apps to remote desktop into my home computer since a long time and it provides a host of services to the free user. OnLive, on the other hand, has a good amount of expertise in the remote desktop/Virtual Machine sector, but not in the features section. Continue reading →

Sharing Apps bring no joy!

I have joined Pinterest. I have also joined Cheers, Instagram, Bufferapp and a whole bunch of other ways to share ‘stuff’. I’m so bogged down with all this sharing that it brought me to think, why all this sharing?

The Internet is a vast resource and it’s been there so long that it has become the lifeline for a lot of people around the world. Thus, it becomes a bit strange that there are so few content creators online and so many content-sharers. Sharing apps such as Pinterest only increase this trend, urging people to simply re-share things they see on the Internet to others, almost as though they were the first to create or discover that nugget of information.

But that in itself doesn’t serve any purpose. Surfing the Internet is easy enough that someone looking for a specific information will find it with a little bit of searching themselves. Thus, the concept of others sharing things your way doesn’t do much for those looking for original content.

Let me give you an example. I read a lot of RSS. I follow blogs all over the spectrum and they all aggregate into my Google Reader. Anyone interested in the list can go here. But since I follow all these blogs, I don’t really need to follow sites like Lifehacker and NetworkWorld on Facebook and Twitter and I don’t need people sharing things from these sites to me. It just beats the purpose of having a social network where I interact with real people instead of bots.

Coming back to Pinterest, I like their iOS app for it’s looks and usability. But I don’t like their idea of a browser bookmarklet or the miriad of ‘Pin it’ apps in the Google Chrome Store. Why would I share something already on the Internet? People looking for those things will definitely find them.

Bufferapp is great if I want to share things from the blogs I read to my friends, but why would I want to buffer a retweet? (Bufferapp is still evolving, they’re trying to focus more on corporate than individuals, or so I think!)

Instagram seems to be the most ‘original post’ friendly app where people post what they see around them, but it all then comes down to sharing those pics around to your social networks. Similar behavior by Chee.rs

I’m not sure what this trend is leading to. There should be a lot many more apps to quickly publish videos to Youtube or post tips to Lifehacker instead of just sharing things already existing on the Internet or elsewhere.

What do you say?