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.

Monkeys, Binary, and Missing Meaning.

As I look for new employment and the adventures that come along with it, I've been spending a lot of late nights on the computer. Going to bed between 3 and 5 am, sleeping till late afternoon, rinse and repeat. Recently my dad woke up to take a pee one night and asked me what I was doing up so late.

"Just messing around. Like usual"

He kind of chuckled and said that I looked like I was really looking hard for something. Trying to figure something out or find something I lost. I didn't really give it much thought until I finally went to bed for the night several hours later.

His words got me thinking. I don't exactly stare at myself in mirrors so I don't know what I look like while "internetting". I'm never searching for anything in particular either, with exceptions to the times I'm actually working on a project. Am I searching for something without even realizing it?

By now we've all heard of the infinite monkey theorem. You know, the one that says if you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with infinite time and infinite typewriters, the monkeys would eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Taking that and combining it with a technological perspective, binary has a similar possibility. Everything computers do these days, be it playing a song or rendering a full length video game, is all done at the very basic level by binary code. The higher level code is translated to code that tells the processor which of its trillions of transistors to turn on or off. Everything that can be rendered digitally can be expressed using a bunch of zeroes and ones. Taking that further, if you have an infinitely large hard drive, and fill it endlessly with every binary combination possible, you could create a digital representation of anything ever. The best movie ever made, the future version of windows, or a treasured family memory that never existed. Everything can be made possible through the right combination of those two oddly significant numbers.

Recent numbers have shown that approximately 1/3 of the world's population is now active on the internet. Each one contributing their own strings of zeroes and ones to the massive pot we call the world wide web. Assuming 7 billion total people on earth, that means about 2.3 billion people are active on the internet (and increasing rapidly).

Usually humans can communicate ideas face to face, but the digital age has made this infinitely easier. Ideas now transcend time and space and you can access an idea from someone you never met that was created several years in the past. You can also collaborate instantaneously with anybody nearly anywhere through this connection and contribute. The internet is the complete aggregate of all human knowledge, and can be accessed anywhere at any time. Nearly every idea, every fact, every thing ever. If a human has said it, thought it, heard it, recorded it, or crossed paths with it in any way, its probably somewhere on the internet in some form. I realized this fact a while ago and it has never ceased amazing me since.

So keeping that idea in mind, is it so far fetched that some part of my brain is searching for meaning without me even realizing? What makes humanity so significant is our inherent curiosity. We don't want to just sit on earth and fly through space at a million miles an hour. We want to know why things work the way they do. We want to control our surroundings to our liking. Its evolution on steroids. Maybe all of us, up until the wee hours of the morning on the computer, are all subconsciously looking for something. For meaning perhaps? For inspiration? For motivation? Companionship? Justification? Something that we don't quite know how to express? Maybe this is the next stage in our intellectual evolution.

Or maybe the internet is just a place for cat pictures and we're all just cursed with ADD. I'm okay with that too.