Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 23rd Feb 2014 23:24 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless



Permalink for comment 583448
by WorknMan on Mon 24th Feb 2014 02:03 UTC
Member since:

Thing about smartwatches is that they are the wrong solution to the problem at hand. The problem, as I see it, is that people want smartwatches because they are tired of digging their phones out of their pockets and glancing at them several times a day. But why do they do that? Because their phones keep vibrating/beeping at them, letting them know there is a notification they need to tend to, even though the vast majority of those notifications were either something the person could care less about, or could've waited until later to see. So in essence, the REAL problem is that phones absolutely SUCK at being intelligent enough to show you only notifications that you care about. Getting a smartwatch is really only putting a band-aid on the problem... like getting a pair of ear plugs because you're tired of your smoke detector going off all day when the battery runs low.

What the industry needs to address is making phones much, much smarter in this area. For example, why can I not tell my phone, 'Silence all notifications, unless my wife/boss/whoever tries to contact me'? And really, it shouldn't matter what method/app they use to initiate the contact. Another issue is that in most apps, the sender has no way of specifying whether the message they're sending to you is urgent or not. So you can't just silence your phone except for any urgent messages, because your phone has no way of knowing what is urgent and what isn't. Moreover, when someone calls you, there's really no way to set a 'do not disturb mode', such that the user gets a message that says, 'I am busy eating/sleeping/jerking off whatever. If this isn't urgent, just leave me a message. If it IS urgent, then press 1 to ring through to my phone ...' How many of you would like to automatically send your boss to voicemail if he/she tries to contact you on weekends? ;)

With all this ranting, I guess what I'm trying to say is that people who think there's not much more that phones can do in the area of innovation can suck it ;)

Edited 2014-02-24 02:05 UTC

Reply Score: 4