I was very excited about the idea of the Smartwatch. When the Pebble hype started on Kickstarter, I backed them by putting my money where my mouth was and ordered a Pebble. It took several months to finally ship to me, but I was still very excited when I received it. Initially, I thought the killer app was going to be notifications on the watch, the idea that you could screen important notifications before you pulled your phone out of your pocket would free up more of my time. The problem is, you have to clear it off your watch now and it just seemed easier to go ahead and do it in one spot, your phone.
The Pebble was nice, especially the battery life which was about a week. I would only hook it up to clunky charger once a week. About a year later I jumped into an Android smartwatch, the LG G-Watch which was large and ugly, but compared to the Pebble was very sleek and beautiful. The Android Wear watch was much more powerful, in color and had a touch screen, such an upgrade from the Pebble. The big drawback was the battery life, of course. I could barely keep the watch going for an entire day, I would have to take it off and charge it up every night, the charger was worse than the Pebble. I even had to send the first one back because the charging contacts on the back stopped working. The apps didn’t really do anything. There were a couple of games that my niece and nephew would love to play at a family dinner, but I would rarely play, because I always had my phone on me.
So, I haven’t had a smartwatch on my wrist for almost a year. They are both in the drawer with all my other old discarded tech. So much promise, but it seems a solution looking for a problem.
Mark Ramsey™ 