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Okay, if you're Gen X or older, you grew up with watches to tell time. And not just tell time, but to keep your time. You were just as (more?) likely to hear, in the 70s and 80s, someone ask, "What time do you have?" than "What time is it?" because everyone acknowledged that, unless you had the Naval Observatory clock on the phone, that you could be a few minutes off.
During a meeting, you could look at your watch not just to see the time, but to see your time. You could leave a minute or two early because "That clock over the door is slow; sorry, have to run." It was socially acceptable.
In fact, those are two of the "sore thumb" cultural changes I've noticed in the last 20 years:
People stopped wearing watches
Nobody asks if you have the time, they ask what time it is since our smartphones all said the same thing.
But now the Apple Watch, largely through the middle-class & up, near-and-truly bougie culture's emphasis on fitness and measuring EVERYTHING, is everywhere. It's cool. The watch is even always-on now. A few small glances in almost any situation is no big deal.
Why is it okay for Gen Z+ers to look at their watch? Why would millennials, who grew up in the period where the time was known, not find watches offensive? They didn't learn to tolerate this distraction like old folk did.
I think the answer is that my question is at least partially a false premise: Millennials don't care as much as the older generations if someone has their entire phone out in a meeting. Which is largely because X's grew up in a time when, if you weren't paying attention to the main thing, you were barely paying attention to it at all. You don't bring a newspaper to the dinner table because you would give the newspaper all of your attention.
No longer! Now we don't even eat dinner together so we can watch TV and surf. Divided attention is the norm (he said uncontroversially). If anything, a watch glance is less offensive than a phone interaction, which is still okay.
What's most interesting, then, is that this is one place where the Venn Diagram, X vs M, has an overlap for completely different reasons. Xers think it's okay to look because of the legacy excuse that you need to know your time and Mers think it's okay because why the heck wouldn't you?
At least that's today's working theory. For me. YMMV.
If I turn my watch off before taking it off, and put it on before turning it on, half the time, maybe more, I’m not asked to unlock it before I can use it – for anything.
Maybe it’s got some way of checking my heartbeat to be reasonably sure it’s me, but I really doubt it. I think turning the watch off stops the, “Have I been taken off?” check, and nobody thought to ensure “I absolutely have been taken off,” is set when the watch is turned back on.
So google news has let me know about the new HP smartwatch, designed by Michael Bastian (whoever that is), and it looks sharp. The Apple watch seems to be, if anything, a little overdesigned. Long-term, that's probably a good thing for Apple. Part of the beauty of the iPhone, and what's allowed it to change the way all phones are made, was that it left buttons behind and allowed you to create any sort of app on the machine's small canvas. That is, no matter what sort of inside access you get, you can't do much with a Head-to-Head football game's controls. You might squeeze out a marginally different race car game or something, but you're basically stuck. When the screen is as wide open as a blank slate, you have lots more flexibility. The Apple watch seems ready to do things we haven't thought of yet.
But what do you really want from a smart watch? There are only two things everyone wants, I think. The time (if only for historical reasons), and a place to read timely message highlights. I imagine that, like me, everyone has their own third. Me, I want built-in GPS so I can track a run without carrying a phone around.
Oh, there probably is a third everyone wants: Don't look like a dork wearing a calculator watch from the 80s. Let's face it, having a calculator right there whenever you need it is really kinda neat, but only during those times when you need it. The rest of the time? Doooork-E. Kinda like a chunky square watch with an oversized crown would look now.
This HP watch dodges the calculator watch feel awfully well. It doesn't have traditional hands like iHands I was kinda hoping to see implemented well, but it's close. There's a dedicated watch section on the face at the top left, which gives a similar feel. Here's an image from Gilt.
So the "watch widget" ring and the tick marks are permanent, but the hands come from the admittedly not retina-quality screen. Also note the orange arrows I added, pointing at the edges of the square watch screen. That's a little cheap looking, though not quite as silly as black bottom bar on the Moto 360, but in a similar, "We botched the implementation," vein.
The permanent clock ring makes that square a little less obvious, which is at least clever. That should visually break up the feeling of the watch as a square screen shoved into a round hole/face, which is pretty important.
Ultimately, this is a much nicer looking watch than Apple's, at least speaking conventionally in 2014. Kicks the pants off of the Pebble. Always tells time. Battery lasts a decent while -- apparently around a week. And it gives you a nice way to check highlights of recent messages. I like it. Right now, I'd probably buy the Microsoft Band or a Garmin running watch instead, as they both have GPSes, natch, but if I was important enough that missing a message could be expensive and didn't want to look like I didn't realize fanny packs are supposed to be worn on your fanny,* this watch would have my attention.
*Btw, folks who don't seem to understand this simple truism -- that fanny packs are to be worn on your fanny -- really bother me. I don't even know if fanny packs are inherently dorky. They're insanely useful when you're hiking and don't want to carry a full pack, or need to get to part of your gear quickly and are wearing a high pack. It's not the accessibility that makes a fanny pack dorky. That, like a calculator watch when you actually need to double check some nontrivial math, is useful. It's the fact that you need to neurotically dip into the pack so often that you allow it to symbolically replace, well, you know, combined with the style faux pas of accentuating your belly, that causes our visceral reason to the dopes that wear fanny packs on their font side. STOP IT, for heaven's sake. ;^)
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