The Future of Wearable Technology

It has been about 2 months now that I have been using the Galaxy Gear Smart Watch. For the most part my experience has been a good one and I enjoy using the watch. With the holidays approaching and everyone looking for great tech gifts I wanted to recap very clearly my impressions of this and then write a little bit about my thoughts on the future of wearable technology in general.

So here we go.

The Galaxy Gear

The pros of this device are that it is great way to keep up to date with email and text messages without needing to grab your phone constantly. You can of course customize the watch display in various modes to include the date, current weather conditions, steps walked and more.

There is also a camera on the wrist band which can take pictures and short video clips which are automatically sent to your phone as well. The quality of the images are low at about 2mp which is to be excepted.

Because it is connected to your phone through Bluetooth it also acts as an extension to your phone. Incoming calls can be viewed to see who is calling without reaching for your phone and you can even accept or reject the incoming the call from the watch, You can even carry on a conversation with the watch.

The cons include the watch band which I have found is bigger then is should be which is probably the result of the camera which is in the band. Also the battery needs to be charged about every 2 days and there is a dock/cradle which you must use. I mentioned the ability to talk (on the phone) through the watch, however this is very difficult if not impossible in crowded places or if you want to have a private conversation. The last negative point I will mention here is that the Galaxy Gear currently only works with the Samsung Galaxy S II and III and Note 2 and 3.

In conclusion if you have one of the supported phones and you like some of the benefits I mentioned here you might enjoy checking this out. There is some real good uses here and it is always a conversation piece when people see it.



Every time I sit at the pub people ask, "hey is that - that smart watch on TV" and just about everyone I have met is curious about what it does. This leads to my prediction which follows.

The Future of Wearable Technology

First is there a future here? The answer is yes and although we are in the very early stages of finding what works (the smart watch) and what does not (google glass). The "google glass" kind of freaked people out. Who wants to have a conversation with someone who's attention is obviously somewhere else and who could be taking pictures of you and even recording the conversation. However wearable technology is actually a natural fit for watches and I believe that this is the area where we will see a successful evolution and acceptance by consumers.

The smart watch will be the first successful and profitable wearable technology and this will probably occur during the next two years. You will see this when the watches get a little smaller and can act independently from smartphones.

Galaxy Gear - Continued Observations

On October 21 and 23 I wrote a review of my experience up to that point with the Samsung Galaxy Gear Smart Watch. I have been pretty much been using the watch most of the time since. For the most part I have enjoyed using the watch but wanted to add the following observations from the past couple of weeks.

#1 - You can't expect too much as this point from wearable technology. Many reviewers and consumers have been a little unfair to this watch. One of the biggest complaints is that the Gear is tied via Bluetooth to the Galaxy Note 2,3 or S3 and S4. It is important to understand and accept that this is the state of this technology at this time. Wearable Technology is in it's infancy so things will improve over time.

#2 - There are two complaints with this watch that I do agree with. The first is that the thing is simply too expensive. $299 is a lot to ask for something that has limited functionality.  The second complaint I have is that the band is too big. This is probably the result of the 1.9 mp camera which is in the band. In fact the watch is almost impossible to wear comfortably when wearing a long sleeve shirt. This is a real problem for professionals.

#3 - One other weird thing. Is it me or does this thing vibrate for no reason or not? From time to time the watch vibrates and there is nothing on the screen. The phone can be set to vibrate when an email or text message is received. But sometimes it just vibrates because it apparently just wants to.

 The camera on the band makes the watch larger then it needs to be.

Darn It! The watch is too big for my long sleeve shirt!

The locking mechanism is also larger then it should be. 

 

 

Will I continuing using this? Other then the little problem with long sleeve shirts, I will. There is a real sense of what I call "smartphone freedom" by not needing to pull out your smartphone every time you want to check or read your email and text messages or just to check the time. When your phone rings - so does your watch so you can quickly see who is calling and even answer the phone without grabbing for your phone.

 

The battery life remains good. The watch needs to be charged about every 2 days which you can simply do while sleeping. The dock which comes with the Gear is efficient and displays the watch nicely.

 

 

This is early technology so there will certainly be issues as real world experiences are reported. So calm down negative reviewers. After all remember that be Apollo 11 landed on the moon, there were 10 previous manned and unmanned Apollo missions as NASA worked through all the challenges of their mission.

 

You can also check out my initial review here.



First Thoughts on the Galaxy Watch

Well I have used the Samsung Galaxy watch 2 days now while walking through the parks at Walt Disney World and I must say for the most part I am impressed. With the watch comfortably on your wrist you can set it up to lightly vibrate for email and text messages. As opposed to looking at your phone constantly you can see the headline of each message and if you want to read the content simply click the message and the content is right there for you on your watch. You can also browse your email and text messages by swiping side to side on a message. Facebook notifications also arrive on your watch but you cannot read them here but you can tell the watch to open them on your phone so when you look at the phone he Facebook message is already displayed.

Talking on the phone, which I did once can be a little difficult in a busy and crowded place like Disney a world because it is of course using the speaker and microphone on the watch.  It was fun to try but became annoying when my son continued to say "you are breaking up!"   In a quiter place, like your car which I did try before leaving on my trip worked just fine.

The watch also has some out of the box apps like "Pedometer" which can track your walking through the day and then uplink a health report to your Galaxy phone. This has reported what I already knew - you really better be prepared to walk ALOT at Disney World.  There are other apps that come so the watch and you can download others like Zite but I will talk more about them in a later post.

I am also impressed with the battery on this little guy. I used it all day yesterday and forgot to charge it overnight. When I noticed this in the morning I panicked until I saw that it still had 77% remaining! The watch comes with a nice docking cradle which the wire had lodged loose somehow when I was setting things up in our room.  Another nice side effect of this watch is that it actually improves the battery life of your smartphone because you tend to look at it much less.

The other observation that I found that just like your phone or tablet the screen of the watch can become difficult to impossible to read when the sun is directly overhead. 

If you have not been using a "old school" watch it will probably take a little time to get accustomed to this, especially because the band is a little big, probably because of the camera but I quickly adjusted to it.

So far this watch has been better then I expected and I can see it becoming a daily part of the work and home experience. I will continue using it and write a full review after our Disney vacation.

Part 2 - Pedometer & Smartphone Freedom (October 23, 2013)













Pedometer
After the original review I of course went out to Disney's Hollywood Studios for the day where I turned on the Pedometer App. The Pedometer app counts your steps and syncs the data to your smartphone. The app works great however I left it on all day and only realized this when I was waiting for Fantasmic to start at about 7:30pm when the watch displayed a "low battery warning". If you recall the previous day I had used the watch the same amount of time and still had 77% battery life at the end of the night. Therefore I would recommend only using this app when you are walking or running.

Smartphone Freedom
The best feature of this smartwatch to me has been what I have been calling "smartphone freedom". Walking through the park I can check out email messages and text messages as well as the time (again, how quaint) without reaching for my smartphone. This saves time and battery life your phone.

Part 3 - Wearable Comfort and a Camera to Boot (October 25, 2013)

I think that one of the challenges for smart watches is actually going to be that many people have simply stopped wearing watches as they became more tied to first, their mobile phones and finally to their smartphones. After all who needed a watch when your phone could tell you the time as well as everything else? In fact it actually took me a couple of days to get accustomed to wearing a "watch" again but eventually I got used to it. The band on the Galaxy watch is larger then it probably needs to be but that it because Samsung stuck a camera (pictured above) on the wrist band. It really does not look that bad and most people probably wont even notice that you are sporting a small mobile camera. If you set up Google+ with their 15gb of free storage the pictures will upload to your smartphone and Google account. You can even take short 15 second videos with the camera.

I snapped the above to photos with my watch while standing in the queue line for the Space Shuttle Atlantis simulator at Kennedy Space Center. Not bad for such a small camera.

You can also snap a series of photos with the watch to create an animated gif (above) and below is a 15 second video I recorded while waiting to become an astronaut at KSC.

The camera is just under 2mp so you are not going to capture great photos here, but if your camera or smartphone are not available this is a good option, and a little fun as well. I kinda felt like a private eye using the camera!


The Galaxy Gear Future

This is really a good first attempt at an actually usable smart watch. The freedom of checking email, text messages and even getting notifications from Facebook with a little handy dandy camera does provide a sense of "smartphone freedom".

This smartwatch is being expanded t other Galaxy watches as we speak so hopefully Samsung will find success here and continue building on what they started here.

Galaxy Gear - Wearable Technology Arrives?

Once I decided to take a pause with my Windows Phone and look elsewhere for a productive smartphone that can do everything I needed, I decided to go back to Android. It has been several years since I used an Android phone so I wanted to make sure I picked the right one. While thinking about this I read some very good reviews of the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and knowing that I had previously issued a Note 2 earlier this year and hearing very positive things about it I decided this would be the one to try out. It also helped that Microsoft has just released their Office 365 app on Android so I knew I would still be productive with this smartphone.


Then I started reading about the Galaxy Gear and saw this commercial advertising the new Gear Smart Watch.



Wearable technology is in it's infancy and there is a long way to go. I actually believe that the previously released and much hyped "Google Glass" was a disappointment and most users were uncomfortable wearing it and those they were talking to were freaked out by it. However the new Galaxy Gear is a step in the right direction. With this watch you can read email messages, text messages, receive social media notifications, check the time (how quaint) and answer phone calls without grabbing your smartphone.

There is even a 1.9 megapixel camera built into the wristband so you can snap a quick picture without using your smartphone. I took a couple pictures with it this morning and below are the results. No bad for such a small camera.

I will be using this while on vacation in Disney World so I will be giving it a work out and will write a review after I get some real experience with it.