“You have a cellphone, maybe a tablet. Sometimes you lug around a laptop. Do you really need one more gadget on you?” Peter Svensson writes for The Associated Press. “Yes, you do. You need a smart watch.”
“At least, that’s what I learned after I got the Pebble, a $150 watch that connects wirelessly to iPhones and Android smartphones to notify you of incoming calls, texts and emails,” Svensson writes. “The Pebble has a lot of rough edges, but it does a good job of demonstrating the potential of ‘wearable’ computing. Apple has filed patents that demonstrate it’s working on a watch, and other ‘smart’ watches are proliferating.”
Svensson writes, “How many times have you missed calls and texts because the ringer was off, and you didn’t feel the vibration because the phone wasn’t on you? Or you forgot to turn the ringer off, and it rang at the wrong time? These things used to happen a lot to me. The Pebble put an end to that. When you get a call, text, email or calendar reminder, the Pebble vibrates. You can set it to provide you with Facebook notifications, too. Because it’s strapped to your wrist, it’s a signal you can’t miss, yet it’s unnoticeable to anyone else. After a few days, I turned off the cellphone’s ringer and vibrating alert – and left them off. The Pebble’s vibrating alert was right for every situation.”
Read more in the full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: With history as our guide, if/when Apple enters the smartwatch market, it will define what a smartwatch is. All other smartwatch makers, whether they have already products on the market or not, will then understand what a smartwatch is supposed to be and they will begin mimicking Apple’s moves.
Those who tread too closely to Apple’s patented IP should be sued back into the stone age.