The Dumb Problem With Smart Watches

I remember as a kid my dad had some ancient Dick Tracy Wrist Radio toys. I always thought they were the coolest thing and eagerly awaited the day when these were more widestream. Even as a kid I knew wearable tech was going to be the future one day.

Well fast forward to 2013 and the legacy those toys left behind are starting to breach in to mainstream culture and every day life. Google Glass and smart watches (specifically the Pebble and Galaxy Gear) are the modern interpretations of that vision. The fact these things exist are simply amazing on a technical and practical level. So why am I not excited?

From how I see it, smart watches are aiming to be an accessory to accommodate the technology you already own. Google glass carries the same ambitions at the moment but I can see Google want's to push it forward to completely replace smartphones as we know it. With this in mind, I will ignore the shortcomings of Glass at the moment and move on to smart watches. Their intent is clear, and I honestly feel like they're failing.

I don't quite know what I was expecting out of the Galaxy Gear. Samsung has a history of cramming gimmicky features and a terrible UI on top of high specs and I kind of anticipated the same thing. The product they presented did not disappoint. Color screen, cameras, and apps made this thing the closest thing to a dumbphone they've made in recent years.

So this might seem pretty great to most people but I was incredibly disappointed. Like I said, I feel the intention of a smart watch is to be more of an accessory to the devices we already own. They should provide at a glance information and just generally stay out of the way. I think Pebble and metawatch do "Smart" better than the Galaxy Gear.

The watches that got it "right" have common e-ink and low power characteristics along with a simple UI and setup procedure. They show you when you get an email and whatnot without you having to lug that 6 inch Galaxy note out of your pocket. Aside from that, they show the time and make it a point to not obstruct your day to day activities.

Since the Gear does the same why am I upset? The gear seems like it tries to overtake the phone. Why snap pics with your phone when you have a camera on your wrist? Why do anything with the phone? Why bother getting the phone? Oh wait, because you HAVE to pair with the phone. The Gear is a more expensive, more distracting smart watch that still needs an expensive phone as it's base. Whats the point?

The most important thing about unobtrusive wearable tech is the battery life and the Gear just fails completely. While the e-ink cousins do a better job at not dying that easy, they still don't last as long as you would hope. Bluetooth is intensive. Charging the gear once a day or the pebble once a week, the fact that you have to consciously remember to charge it alongside the phone is an annoyance.

My vision for the future of wearable tech is kind of a black and white one to be honest. Either rely solely on the wearable tech or use it as a luxury. Glass has the potential to replace the smartphone one day. It can comfortably emulate the main features of a smartphone without any additional tech. Smart watches would still need a bluetooth headset for calls typically. Smart watches really should take the foundation laid by pebble and the like, and build on it. Longer lasting batteries, more efficient pairing technology, and a UI that is simple and pleasant to use. Just show me if I have notifications and let the phone handle the rest. Most of the time I should forget it's there at all.

Then again,  for prices like the present ones for these types of devices, you probably don't want to forget about it. That's another issue that should be addressed but one step at a time I suppose.

Hardware Concept - One Stop Dock

Portable computing has come a long way in recent years. Where 6 years ago, our only option for portable computing was a heavy laptop computer, now we have devices that fit in our pockets that can do everything we need on the road.

However, this abundance of devices poses a possible problem. There's too many of them! I'll give an anecdote to explain further:

When I left for college, my family bought me a laptop computer, coincidentally the one I am still using today. Later during the HP fire sale, I bought a HP TouchPad tablet and flashed Android on it. I also have an Android smartphone.

Back home, I had a mid range desktop PC. While the specs are a bit dated, it still outperforms my laptop when it comes to things like 3D gaming or video editing. However, since my life at school needed portability, all of my programs, settings, and files were set up ideally on my laptop. When I came home, even in the presence of my more powerful gaming computer with the larger screen, I was still on my laptop most of the time. I only reluctantly turned my desktop on when I wanted to play a game. Talk about first world problems.

Now I propose a solution to this. One device with all settings, that can be "upgraded" at will. Basically you have your tablet or laptop computer with it's limited specs. However, since it's portable you have all of your settings on there. Sure, cloud helps to bridge this gap but it's still not really enough.

Now imagine you have the option to dock this in a setup with much higher specifications. When docked, the system would ignore the onboard specs (or combine them a la SLI or something) and gives you the full scale performance you expect from a larger more permanent computer. That would be amazing!

The dock could be configurable like a standard desktop. You would have all the ports and features you dont get from a smaller tablet or laptop. You could even do things like install stand alone drives in the computer that back up the entire OS using the built in hardware, while you use the dock's hardware to do your work / gaming.

Click to embiggen and read my musings.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine that dock now becomes a home mainframe device. You access content on your portable device from the living room TV via wifi or something. Suddenly you only need one device and some (hopefully standardized) accessories.

I know this gets kinda sketchy but, now lets go to the maximum of extravagance and wastefulness that makes America awesome. Imagine you take that main tablet with you and dock it when you get home. But WAIT! you want to watch movies on the couch and browse with it but you want to keep the tablet docked to charge / backup / someone else is using it/ etc.

There's a type of computer called a zero client device. Basically its a barebones computer that relies on a mainframe to run it's OS. Take that, apply it to a tablet (bare bones, low specs, basically running from the dock / main device combo). Now you can browse on the couch and not mess with anything else. The best part - these devices could come extremely cheap because they will be used for light activity and don't need onboard storage.

Anyways, this is what I see as the future of personal computing. It's not really Post-PC, but rather PC+. Because you know what? I LIKE a tactile keyboard and high power, and I won't be giving that up anytime soon.

Hardware Idea - Portable Laptop Printer

When I was in college, I was always paranoid about getting my term papers printed well before the due date. Many professors had a zero tolerance late policy so if your paper wasn't in her hand by 8:00am, you got a failing grade - NO EXCEPTIONS. Because my luck had a tendency to gravitate to the bad end, I always took precautions and made sure my work was printed a full 24 hours before the deadline. I always wished there was an easier way though.

I found the following diagram in a pictures folder on my external hard drive a few days ago. I apparently made this in my sophomore year of college, no doubt during a particularly boring class. I figured it belonged on this blog:

Sorry for the quality of the upload.

It's a little hard to see but the printer is a very flat, approximately laptop dimensioned printer that you could take with you alongside the laptop. I'm not exactly sure if technology has reached the point where this is practical yet, but basically the whole top would be a large black and white ink cartridge. under that would be a small stepper motor type thing for applying the ink. The whole thing would be powered by a rechargable battery which is capable of printing X number of pages between each charge. It would have the typical USB printer connection as well as a mini / micro USB cable port for connectivity. I didn't include it at the time but it might be a better idea at this point and time to include WI-FI printing / Cloud printing.

The right side of the device would have a small LCD display for messages (mainly errors). There would also be a cancel button, a resume button, and a power button.

Printing would occur in a similar fashion to a fax machine. blan paper would go in the front and be spit out the back as the completed document. Simple as that.

This would be a great product for the business person on the go. Sometimes you have last minute documents to print and are nowhere near a public printing location. This printer would be small enough and lightweight enough that you could just throw it in your laptop bag and go about your daily life. It would also be great in an office setting. It's small enough that it could be placed below a monitor on a desk and forgotten about. This is especially great for all in one type computers (iMac, HP TouchSmart, etc).

Office Example

So again, this idea depends entirely on battery technology as well as printer mechanics technology. I think it's a possibility in the near future though. I've seen some portable 3D printers, and this only needs 2 dimensions.

Only time will tell