ELEKS decided to build a 3rd party Tesla application for the Apple Watch.
So, from the development perspective, Apple Watch is currently a quite limited device with a weak potential for programmers. No, hold on. Perhaps this statement isn’t entirely correct, since the smart watch isn’t selling yet and we can only make our assumptions based on the SDK that is in its first Beta stage. As a result, we get rather mixed feelings from the smart watch. On the one hand – everything is beautiful, new and interesting, and on the other – the stripped-down functionality makes it impossible to develop beautifully designed really functional apps right now.
Watch the video of the application in action.
“Let me unlock my car by fiddling with the homescreen on my watch’ tiny, stamp-sized screen, looking for the Tesla app, pressing and holding on one of the arbitrary screens of the application and pressing the tiny unlock button.”
Meanwhile, any sane person is already halfway home.
As my general attitude towards the Apple Watch as well as my very negative review of Android Wear/the Moto 360 make clear, I just don’t see any benefit in the way Android Wear/Apple Watch currently implement the concept of a smartwatch. It’s just way too much fiddly and cumbersome computer on a far too tiny display on devices that require far too much charging.
How long will it take for you to stop using that fiddly and time-consuming Tesla unlock process on your watch and just get out your keys/use keyless entry instead? Once the initial novelty wore off, my Moto 360 ended up in my device drawer within a matter of days. I don’t see myself using it again, and so far, I’ve seen nothing to indicate the Apple Watch will be any different (for me! Your mileage may vary! This is an opinion! Yours may be different! Deal with it!).
you’d just say
siri, unlock my car please
or
cortana, unlock my car please
Then you would get the inevitable,
“I’m sorry, I can’t allow that” back.
“Open the pod bay doors, Siri.
Open the pod bay doors, Siri!”
“I’m sorry I can’t do that, Dave…”
Today I tweeted this: Apple Watch is the Lisa of the new Apple.
It is useless, expensive, nobody wants it as it is, and Apple is investing a lot in it.
Which will blaze the trail for a future system by Apple that will take the word by storm, having reduced the cost and figured out the right UI, like the Mac did?
I’d agree. But, I bet it still uses the same name.
The first iphone kinda sucked from a certain perspective ( Expensive, no SDK, no 3G ). But, it was also still better in some ways ( Easy, Efficient and Elegant smart phone for Everyman). So, if the Apple Watch does something better than the others and solves a real problem, It will be ok, regardless of other issues it has.
Edited 2015-02-02 16:26 UTC
It’s hard to see what problem it solves, though. There’s a reason why smartphones keep getting bigger: small touchscreens are fucking useless. Now we’re supposedly turning wristwatches, which never were meant for interaction, into miniature smartphones.
Smartwatches will have found their niche when they’re simple displays with gimmicky health sensors attached.
I don’t know what the point of a smart watch is currently.
But I also wasn’t sold on ipods, iphones or ipads when they were released. So my track record isn’t exactly spectacular.
Oh but…
… i saw the point of ipods, iphones or ipads when they were announced. I see some point for most gadgets that show up in the news.
I still don’t see a point for the smart watches…
Why was an ipod so much better than what was out there, when it was released? The fact that it worked with Macs ? The click wheel?
I’m not saying that those aren’t the right answers, just that I didn’t then and still don’t understand why the ipod was the digital music player that took off. I’m obviously wrong, I think, but my reasoning still seams right.
Oh that is easy. It didn’t have a million features complicating the UI, and (at the time) iTunes was extremely easy to use.
The thing iTunes got right was that you no longer had to bother thinking of your music as files. Managing directories with music files and manually copying them to a device is really rather complicated for a large portion of the population. Musicmatch and Media Player was really hopeless compared to iTunes, and if you can’t very easily get content on your player, then what is the point
For me as a geek organizing music files manually stopped being something i could be bothered to do the very first time i tried iTunes. Too bad they gradually screwed up iTunes since then.
Finally the design probably helped as well as most players back then were really ugly. For example http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZG4fHjD3BnQ/U7QA_zNSZVI/AAAAAAAANs4/Fs9Fk…
I just can’t agree to any of those points. They all seem wrong. The only thing that makes sense to me, is that they got lucky and/or the ads won people over.
I saw people completely give up when presented with an ipod and itunes. They just could not figure out how to make everything work.
I also saw people with less capable devices ( usb mass storage device mp3 players) figure it out easily. Use napster to find music, put in music player, done.
Obviously, Ipods took off and sold like hotcakes made out of crack, but I never had much of a use for them.
I thought the selling point was the amount of storage. Since it had a hard drive, it had significantly more than flash based players.
No, it’s the UI. I’ve got an old Creative Zen Xtra with an adequate 30 GB of storage, and in addition to being slightly too big, the interface is very clumsy and inefficient. This was the norm back then. People begged for someone (Sony) to make an elegant portable mp3 player, but they refused.
Of course, the iPod also looked a lot better than the Creative.
Hmm, you’ve held a view that was contrary to a few hundred million sales for 12 years…
Instead of asking: “what about me is unlike these many tens of millions of people and what may that explain to me about why they did so vehemently disagree with me and love their iPods?” You assume: it was just luck or ads.
Yeah, that makes sense.
No, I said its one of the two. Its either that there is a real substantial difference that I don’t understand OR it was luck/ads.
This is why the conversation started, I’m disqualifying myself from making a pronouncement on the fate of the apple watch, because of my poor track history predicting and understanding Apple’s devices.
And I’m suggesting there are many good reasons to think it is not the latter.
Well, now you are. You’re previous post implied that I didn’t see that as an option. English is a tricky language. Its possible that you wrote something that did not convey your true meaning and/or that it was written correctly but not interpreted correctly by my standard Usian English.
In any case, its clear that there are only two options. As the question pertains to my own perceptive ability, perhaps its asking a bit much for me to ascertain the more probable cause. Much like asking a blind guy that was sucker punched why he didn’t see it coming.
Well, I am also suggesting that you aren’t legitimately considering the the former as well. That you have rejected or dismissed several of the obvious, clear, well-supported, and numerous factors that played a part and have been suggested here. I am also suggesting that it is most certainly not luck or advertising and think most suggestions of such “reasons” are delusional, ludicrous, and based on your own animosity or lack of understanding rather than evidence.
Neither. The first iPod didn’t even have a click wheel, and working with Mac (and only Mac at first) was a drawback if anything. The iPod took off, once it worked with both PC and Mac, because it was better than any other portable audio player on the market. It had a useable amount of space (5 gb) and for that you’d pay almost the same price as you’d pay for a 128 mb flash-based player from other manufacturers. Quite simply, “mp3 players” as they were called then were expensive gadgets that wouldn’t even hold an entire album encoded at a decent bitrate.
The iPod had tons of flaws, too. The mechanical hdd was prone to failure, the battery sucked and wore out quickly, and iTunes… well, we’re still feeling that one today. But it was the first one to have a reasonable amount of space in it and thus actually serve the purpose for which mp3 players were intended. Of course, 3 years later when the iTunes music store took off and the DRM locked your songs to iPods only clinched the deal.
That’s weird. I thought it was just because it had better synchronizing software that made putting music and podcasts on your player a one click action.
There were harddisk mp3 players before the ipod
If you ignore every mp3 player after the first 32mb versions you are right.
Nope.
Me neither, & inclined to think a special needs Apple version of smartwatch has to bomb. Bound to sell bazillions, suppose.
Not with the current state of iOS accesibility;
http://applevis.com/blog/advocacy-apple-braille-ios-news/accessibil…
Do you mean you don’t like Apple products or that you don’t see a use in mp3 players, smartphones and tablets?
Compared to the Lisa era, Apple have so much power right now that they can spin almost anything including this watch into a great success story despite any deficiencies. Queue the queues!
Edited 2015-02-02 16:46 UTC
I completely agree.
I do not need another device that needs updates, setting changes or a recharge at the end of the day.
When it comes to a watch, I just want something that is well built, accurate and has a battery that lasts years not hours.
I absolutely agree. I am very conservative when it comes to watches. A watch has only to tell me the exact time and the date. I don’t buy a Rolex only because I can’t afford it.
I want a crazy smart spy watch that I can unlock my invisible car with. We all gotta dream. Let me have my batshit crazy fantasy!
EDIT –
+1 if they make a self count down timer that looks like a self destruct sequence.
Edited 2015-02-02 16:45 UTC
If I want to open my car, I touch the lever and it unlocks. I don’t need a watch for that.
Tapping your apple watch to the lock should be all that’s required to unlock the door.
You could even make it more secure by using a shifting key(kinda like on 2 step auth for google/blizzard/etc) so that way the signal can’t be duplicated. Then you don’t even have to put your hands in your pockets to unlock your car.
In this day and age, people wear stuff on the wrist as a fashion statement. A “clock” is readily available on the pc and the phone.
So a fashion statement.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple Watch, Gold edition, would sell in spades. It simply doesn’t matter one bit that it is useless and cumbersome and a security problem for these people.
Next.
I didn’t read the story, but what stupid rule is getting in the way of that happening? Set an alert that unlocks your car when you are within 10 feet of it.
I still think there’s plenty of use cases for the watch. Most of what my phone does these days is notify, initiate, or do quick lookups of small bits of data.
I don’t see the use case when you need a phone and a watch to get things done. But if/when they get rid of the phone dongle, I can see lots of advantages to just having a watch, a tablet, and a workstation.
Can I use it to take selfies of myself eating cupcakes?