“Apple’s iWatch is only a rumor. But Samsung’s Galaxy Gear watch is here now,” David Pogue writes for The New York Times. “But it won’t be adorning the wrists of the masses any time soon.”
“The Gear looks and feels fine on your wrist. It’s not waterproof, but Samsung says it can withstand little splashes. You charge its battery by clamping it into a tiny USB charger — every night,” Pogue writes. “If you’d showed this to someone in 1980, they would have fallen down and worshiped you as a god. But just throwing a bunch of trees into a pit doesn’t make it a log cabin. And Samsung, sooner or later, will learn that it can’t build a coherent device just by throwing features at it.”
“The Gear is a human-interface train wreck. All of it. The software design, user guide, English translations and design consistency,” Pogue writes. “The relationship between the device the watch is linked to and the watch is never the same twice. You wind up chasing the installation, login and setup for each new feature all over Androidland, sometimes in endless loops of infuriating screens.”
Pogue writes, “Nobody will buy this watch, and nobody should. But there’s something here under all the rubble. Sometimes the Gear can be liberating; sometimes it makes possible tasks that you can’t do while you’re holding a smartphone. We just need somebody to find the right balance of labor between the watch and its companion device — to figure out what a smartwatch should and shouldn’t be. Once somebody nails that formula, the age of genuinely useful smartwatches will be upon us.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Gee, wonder who that “somebody” will be? 😉
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