I completely agree, having watched this year's Google I/O panel on smartwatch interaction design, it is very obvious that Google has put an enormous amount of thought into their watch platform. They came to a fundamentally different conclusion for what a smartwatch should do, and I really enjoy the experience. The contextual information from Google Now is incredibly useful and it feels like my watch tells me not only what time it is, but information personally tailored to my lifestyle. For example, I always go out after work on Tuesdays, and right now my watch is telling me that there is lots of traffic on the way to my favorite bar. In the morning, it tells me how long my commute will be and what the weather will be that day. I can start navigation from my watch with my voice and get every direction as I need it. I can control any music player with notification support. I don't run any interaction-heavy apps on my watch, and I can't imagine ever wanting to do so. The thought of browsing a photo library or sending my heartbeat to someone seem like features for the sake of having features but in reality are completely unnecessary.
Your comment has given me my first quantifiable measured sensation of feeling old. if you go out every Tuesday, you will learn the traffic patterns, and will naturally develop a series of contingency routes that you could take in the event of traffic. The watch is novelty more than useful. It will make you forget how you used to do things and in turn feel dependent on it, when in fact it is simply a novelty that distracted you so much that you forgot that what you were doing was fine.
I couldn't up-vote this more! I just don't have a compelling reason to use such a device. Weather, traffic, map and such data is just novelty for me. If I question myself what can I do with watch that isn't possible otherwise there's just one or two (heart rate monitor and perhaps chat). Even those aren't really necessities as much as novelty. Perhaps app developers will come up with good problems to solve but I can't think of any use case right now.
It will be interesting to see @gruber's behavior with regards to the watch. He seems more or less condemned to buy and wear one all the time given who he is. Will he find it actually useful or more of a pain? I could see an over/under betting pool on the number of days it would take before he ultimately decides to give up on it.
Search for and read my reply elsewhere in this topic for my use case. I admit this isn't a device for everyone, but some of us find it to be incredibly useful.
I was actually quite disturbed with the Apple unveiling of the watch, I know it has been expected and what not. But a device that is literally monitoring my heart rate constantly all day, guiding me down a street with "gentle taps like a person" to tell me which direction to go. I feel like a small part of humanity is being optimised away. It's an incredibly scary thought.
These kinds of things have been happening to the human experience for some time now. I don't need to ask anyone how to get anywhere, or figure out how to navigate there with the rise of GPS on devices I have with me all the time. I can have food brought to my doorstep without ever talking to anyone.
At the same time, it's enabling exciting new possibilities. I can meet people with shared interests in a huge multitude of ways. I can talk to practically anyone I've ever met within a minute. I can learn how to do almost anything at a basic level given some modest interest and an Internet connection.
I think people are only beginning to realize the all-encompassing nature of how technology is affecting how we live, because it has become so incredibly pervasive and is moving so quickly. The human experience is most definitely changing, but it's not all for the worse. It's easy to be sentimental about the past, but the possibilities are often too enticing to hold onto those relics in favor of new things.
The taps guiding someone down the street struck me as being useful to blind people. Imagine if white canes became museum pieces in our lifetime because the blind become equipped with GPS enabled wearables.
Well, white canes are more about locating curbs and fire hydrants and other people than they are about finding where you are on a map. But we can and should imagine a future in which blind people have prosthetic aids that give at least limited senses of sight to the blind, enough to avoid tripping and obstacles (and the white cane). That seems eminently within reach in the next couple of decades, if not the next five years.
I don't necessarily think that these advancements are entirely a bad thing; I just think that there is the strong possibility that they could encourage negative traits with future generations. Using technology to better peoples lives is a tremendous thing, but using it as a crutch to enable accidie is worrying. Perhaps I'm just a pessimist.
I have an hour commute in the bay area twice a day, I used waze(now owned by Google) every trip. It's rare that it routes me in the same route twice in a row, there are all sorts of dynamic conditions that affect traffic conditions, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Waze also alerts my departure time and accurate ETA to my wife, which is also pretty cool.
Google now is also really cool, if creepy. It sees the airplane ticket confirmation in my email, or a concert ticket, it computes realtime traffic information, then gives me a heads up that I may want to start thinking about leaving, without any input from me.
This seems like a much better system them relying on myself to set some sort of calendar event which is not at all reactive to any dynamic conditions and is predicated on me to remember to do so. It also does this without any input from myself. I see it as an actual step in the direction of "Personal Digital Assistant" that was promised to us so long ago and services like google now are just in their infancy.
Now saying all that, I have no plays of going to Apple, I don't like their close-ecosystem, and have little faith that the iwatch will be the cash cow that the iphone/ipad was for Apple. I have for quite a long time and still do feel that Apple pulled a one/two hit wonder by being in the right place at the right time with the right team.
This comment is a repeat of many similar comments on older technologies. I don't mean to say the sentiment is wrong, but technological assistance in small ways can potentially lead to a bigger impact. A book I'd recommend that relates to this topic is Smarter Than You Think which put a lot of this stuff in perspective for me.
Even if you go out every Tuesday, you can't anticipate anomalous events which may impact traffic. I use Google Maps even when I'm going to a known destination, because it will tell me if there is a traffic problem on my normal route before I encounter it and enable me to route around it easily.
Is it more likely thinking of use-cases for the device instead of the other way around? With new technology, some people make out that they cannot possibly live without it and give a list of scenarios where they would use it, but in reality do they really have those scenarios particularly when the novelty of a new material device has worn off?
But learning those things doesn't add as much value to the economy. Technology has an unintended consequence of squeezing every last drop of market-lusting value out of you.
