“Apple made a strong case for how you can use its upcoming Apple Watch, and the device stacks up well against the competition,” Anick Jesdanun reports for The Associated Press. “Apple Watch is among the most expensive on the market… The cheapest Apple Watch is $349, and that’s designed for fitness enthusiasts. A stainless-steel version for everyday wear starts at $549. A luxury edition with 18-karat gold starts at $10,000 and can cost as much as $17,000.”
“Apple Watch also doesn’t have GPS for better distance tracking. Then again, GPS is rare in smartwatches [because GPS is massive battery hog – MDN Ed.]. Apple Watch will use your phone’s GPS to learn your running pattern and calibrate its built-in accelerometer for better tracking the next time you go for a run and leave your phone at home,” Jesdanun reports. “Apple is offering different sizes, colors, materials and bands, but all of the watches have rectangular faces. Motorola’s Moto 360 and LG’s G Watch R are among those with round faces. Apple has a good reason, though. Round faces are fine for graphical content, such as photos and maps, but they are inefficient for text.”
MacDailyNews Take: Actually, photos and maps are usually square, so a round face is entirely the wrong choice, which, of course, ought to be Lenovo’s motto for their Motorola brand.
Motorola. Entirely the wrong choice™.
Lucky Goldstar is an even bigger joke, if that’s even possible.
Jesdanun reports, “Apple Watch can do a lot — more than rival watches and probably more than you need it to do — so you’ll need to decide which features and apps you’ll find convenient. Ultimately, it comes down to how willing you are to pay for that convenience.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As Mac is to Windows PC, as iPod is to portable media players, as iPhone is to so-called smartphones, as iPad is to tablets, Apple Watch is to so-called smartwatches. No contest.
Related articles:
Apple Watch priced at $349-$17,000 launches on April 24, pre-orders start on April 10 – March 9, 2015
Apple Watch, the world’s first real smart watch, will be a massive hit – September 9, 2014
Newsflash: Apple sells premium products at premium prices to premium customers – October 23, 2012
But if you are running round the block, wouldn’t a round face be fine?
only if your block is round, most are squares.
Is it a “block” if it’s round?
Lol to all above… 😉
silver or black , that is the question
shiny or matte
Gold or Rose Gold…. Hmmmm… 🙂
Black Aluminum or black stainless steel?
Red or blue bands.
42mm Space Gray Aluminum WATCH SPORT not because it’s less expensive but because it’s 30% lighter. 😘😍
To be fair, maps are only rectangular because paper is rectangular, and they’re only square on screen because screens are rectangular. Fundamentally a circular screen is no worse for displaying map data than a rectangular one, the main differentiating factor being the overall viewable area. In terms of viewing your location and surrounding area a circle is almost better suited because it’s its own proximity guide. Photos are obviously different.
Photos don’t have to be different, though. If you think about it, the perfect shape for photos would be an oval, mimicking the actual field of visionn you see. Note, the pupils of the eye that let light in are circular. I don’t know about you, but it kind of brings to mind those old-timey oval portrait photos.
Most of the time, the reason we make things with 90º corners is usually due to technology limitations.rounded corners are hard to do, despite them being a more common shape in the world around us.
My implication was more that whilst photos cold be any shape, they tend to be rectangular and nothing is likely to change that, a map is the shape of whatever you’re viewing really. This is not to say that a rectangular watch isn’t the best option, but not for all the reasons mentioned.
Well said there mxnt41 and I’ll take your idea one step further by pointing out that a sphere is better than a circle regarding location view, especially when three dimensional movement happens, as in the cases of swimming, traveling stairs, elevators, multistoried buildings, skydiving.
The world in not a flat round pizza, it’s a 3D sphere.
Some day computer makers may be able to grasp and reflect that idea with their products, until then, it’s flat square/rectangular screens.
Have a good day.
White is to gold as Blue is to Black. Which do you see?
Couldn’t resist!
For me the Apple Watch has a 2 killer apps:
1. Notifications. With an Apple Watch you no longer have to take your phone out of your pocket and look at it (or go find it somewhere in the house) whenever you hear it beep. You don’t have to carry your phone around the house with you anymore. And you can leave it in your locker at school, so long as it and your watch are both on your school’s wifi network. You could probably even leave it in your dorm room while you go to class so long as it and your iPhone are both on your campus’s wifi. You can leave it locked in your desk drawer at work instead of having it out on your desk.
2. “Hey, Siri” on your wrist. That’s going to be awesome to always have an artificial intelligence to call on at any time just by calling “Hey Siri” into the air. I love using “hey Siri” to check the time, weather and manage alarms when my phone is charging next to my bed. I’d use Siri for a lot more if I didn’t have to go find my phone or take it out of my pocket and press a button to use it.
For these two features alone, the Apple Watch is a no-brainer for me. I’ll pre-order it the moment it goes on sale.
So Huawei’s bulky dog-dish round face was absolutely the spot-on best design choice that will result in inevitable instant success – oh wait – only on the Bizarro World.
I do have to wonder why in the years of Cathode Ray Tubes those engineers spent so much time, effort and cost turning a fundamentally round viewing screen into an acceptably rectangular one when it seems a round one is perfectly ok for pictures. You couldn’t make this up.
Probably data transfer, not the image projection.
640 x 480 bits is easy to code for. (Move left to right, move down one, repeat.)
Having a circular image (non-Euclidean geometry) would be very different. If the US can’t switch to the metric system, I’d be tough to change to something like this.
Besides, when photos were on paper, cutting them round would waste more paper than just making them rectangular.
Stupid-watches catch a wave.
Apple Watch catches a Tsunami.
The good news is that the Samsung Super Stupid Watch just got dropped kicked to oblivion! lol
Have to dispute this meme that GPS is a massive battery hog. I have a Polar M400 sports watch that includes built in GPS and heart-rate monitor via bluetooth. It’s no Apple Watch, but in terms of battery life and GPS, I use it with GPS enabled for a typical 30-60 minute run every day, and it only needs recharging once a week. The battery hog on the Apple Watch is the screen.
I’d like to remind everyone that the current state of short battery lives is due to end in two years.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3037184/fast-feed/the-end-of-your-smartphone-battery-woes-is-only-two-years-away 😃💥😱
I’ll buy one because it is Apple.
Like parents:
First you rely on them even though you do’nt know why
Then you rely on them and you know why
Then you start to doubt them, could they be wrong?
Then you go back to being sure, they never let you down (except for Mail…)
And when they finally die you get a smile on your face and a tear, remenmbering the good times and imaging life without….