Even a broken watch is right twice a day: Not an un-charged Apple Watch The Apple Watch will require daily charging thanks to its poor battery life, Apple CEO Tim Cook has admitted. The daily maintenance is reminiscent of the bad old days when timepieces needed to be wound up to keep them ticking. Speaking at a live Q+A, the Apple boss said: "We think people are going to use it so much you will …
"I've no use for one, but I can't see the problem of having a 2nd device to charge every night. With wireless charging, just leave phone and watch on charging pad."
Perhaps, but last I heard, the iWatch doesn't support Qi or the like. That said, there also needs to be consideration for people, say, on the go who may not have ready access to a charger at night or who go the zombie route and don't sleep one night to make some hectic deadline. It would be nice to have a timepiece capable of holding its own for a longer period, say at least two days unassisted. I'm curious about the concept myself, but at this point none of these have hit the the price/perk sweet spot, and I'm willing to wait. I'm probably more inclined to pick an e-ink-based device that can throw up a passive display. Or maybe something like the Qualcomm Toq, only with a more-refined interface.
It's like a regression. Turn of the 20th Century soldiers started wearing wristwatches, so they didn't have to use busy hands to pull a pocket watch (usually on a chain) out, and open it to read the time.
Wristwatches caught on because they are practical.
Now the hapless youngsters have gone back to pulling a device out of their pockets, opening the case, if they have that type, and touching a button to light up the time.
Instead of just turning their wrist a bit to see the time.
'kin idiots.
When this tech will also be able to show me incoming mails and IM/SMS, I'll upgrade...
I have a Pebble watch (it was a gift, not sure I'd have bothered to pay for one) and it does show me incoming stuff. Short stuff it displays, but email just tells me I've got an email. It does show the CLI of incoming calls and I can tell the phone to reject the call using one of the watch buttons.
It only needs charging once a week, too.
(contrast my 30yr-old Casio LCD watch which lasts several years on a battery and is still working)
@Number6
Is your Pebble on old firmware? They show all phone notifications including content (like BBC Sports goal updates etc), and I can read email content on mine, was well as whole SMS etc. It doesn't just show the CLI, it pulls up the contact name from the phone.
The Pebble also has a daylight vis display with memory, dozens of apps for maps, GPS, compass, fitness and loads of other useless stuff too like the ability to make your own custom watchfaces and apps.
I haven't worn a watch since I was seven. As a consequence, I am very good at estimating the time. It's unusual for me to be more than 5 minutes out and I can usually guess more accurately than that. I use my phone more often than I need to tell the time so having the time on my wrist is absolutely no use to me.
@Mage ""You’re going to wind up charging it daily,” he emphasised."
Well, according to Mr Cook, "You’re going to wind up charging it daily,” he emphasised.
So it's going to be like those wind up torches, obviously. Just attach the eco-friendly winding handle conveniently supplied with every watch and wind it for 5 minutes for each hour of planned operation and think of the bonus calories you're burning off at the same time. Win-win for every fanboi.
But my understanding is that this does not work out of the box with those iPhones ! The extra costs involved in wireless chargers, new backs for your phone etc.. is way to much, when you just forked out for a new wardrobe to allow your to transport your HUGE (and that's Apples words) new iPhone is beyond most peoples budgets.
As the device hasn't gone on sale yet there seems to be a lot of fuzzy infor doing the rounds.
If my memory is correct, Apple said
that it will work with the iPhone 5S. In fact that is the onlyt way to get ApplePay working with an iPhone 5S
By modern standards, the iPhone 5S is not a huge phone.
We shall have to wait and see what the thing is with charging these watchlike things.
I do know on thing for sure.
I won't be buying any smart watch no matter who makes it. Getting watch staps to go round my huge bony wrists is next to impossible and for devices that come with builtIn straps/bracelets type thingies, then they are a clear no-go for me.
Now if someone was to put one on a nice gold chain and in a case like a proper pocket watch I might be interested.
"Other more expensive Swiss ones were better of course"
And the cost of a genuine Swiss watch is now approaching what I'd consider car money. However for any sadsters currently dependent upon their smartphone to tell them the time, they might consider upgrading to a Seiko 5. That's a lovely piece of self winding mechanical precision (from Singapore last time I looked) offered in a range of cases and dial designs for around the fifty quid mark.
A lot of people aren't wearing watches any more because they carry a phone and they use that instead. What would make them look at their wrist for information about emails, chats, etc. when they're not doing that even for something as simple as the time of day?
Some people wear a watch as a fashion statement (hence the large market in fake Rolexes, etc). But I can't see someone who does that swapping their bejewelled hunk of stylish polished Swiss perfection for something cheaply made out of plastic from Apple.
Some people wear a watch simply because they want to know the time of day. There's nothing about an iWatch that sounds like it does that job better, or at all after 24hrs away from a mains socket.
The market for iWatch is supposedly China and handwritten tweets
To read short messages in chinese easily without a lot of context you need to know the order the strokes were made in. The iWatch has a messaging app where you can draw a chinese character and it is sent to the recipient a stroke at a time in real time, so they can get your tweet and understand it quickly.
Not quite: you can always understand the meaning of written Chinese messages - this is as expressive as any other written language, and a lot more compact than many. The problems arise in verbal communication.
Mandaran Chinese has a very small repertoire of sounds, compared to other languages, so the number of homophones is very high: cases like the English "red" and "read" are much more commonplace. The fact that Mandarin is actually a second language for most of the population just adds to this confusion.
So when speaking face to face, it's not uncommon for Chinese to make a "writing" gesture of part of the word that they're saying, in order to disambiguate a word that sounds the same. On the phone, this option is not available.
Still, it sounds like someone at Apple inventing an application for this watch, rather than them inventing the watch to fill a need.
I also recall that all but the most expensive and elaborate timepieces tended to drift significantly as the day passed. If anyone's ever seen "The Secret Life of Machines" Tim Hunkin did an episode on the quartz watch and covered timepiece history in some detail. Knock the cheap quartz watch all you want, but it's hard to beat it for consistency.
"...Yes, back in the days you'd have to re-synch your watch once a day...
Strange...but my 45 year old Omega SpeedMaster doesn't "drift significantly" at all...never has...and has kept perfect time since new. Never had to sync it. It just works! :-)
And for those who think that having to wind a watch every day is so tedious...might be a good idea to check yourselves into a hospital for a checkup.
"Strange...but my 45 year old Omega SpeedMaster doesn't "drift significantly" at all...never has...and has kept perfect time since new. Never had to sync it. It just works! :-)"
I said, "all but the most expensive and elaborate timepieces..." A $3700 Omega Speedmaster chronograph qualifies as "expensive and elaborate".
My Seiko Kinetic watch has been ticking over nicely for 15 years now. I wear it daily, so I presume the battery stays fully charged - but still 15 years is good going.
I did stop wearing it once for a week. After a couple of days the pointers stopped moving, but I gave it a little shake and they moved back to the right time and carried on where they left off.
As a time piece that I don't have to think about/interact with other than its actual function of telling me the time when I look at it - it's perfect.
I've one of the early Seikos, possibly from around the time you brought yours 98/99? what I did find irritating was the need to change the capacitor every 5/6 years when it wouldn't hold it's charge overnight.
My thinking was; you sold me this with the promise that I don't have to change the battery every five odd years, changing something else with a similar time frame isn't a massive improvement...
"I've one of the early Seikos, possibly from around the time you brought yours 98/99? what I did find irritating was the need to change the capacitor every 5/6 years when it wouldn't hold it's charge overnight."
That was due to the capacitors being faulty. Now they come equipped with lithium batteries instead. No idea on their lifetimes though.
My concern would not be the fact it needs charging every night (although that would be a pain without some sort of induction pad, and inconvenient even then - forget to put it on the pad as you go to bed - no watch the next day).
If it needs charging once per day when new, how long will it be before the battery gets "tired" and only has 50% charge capacity. At that point the watch keels over half way through the day, making it useless.
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