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Comment by bt848 | Hacker News Reader

Apple marketing machine in action: get local press to write up as a novelty feature that main competitor has had for ages.

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Please name this competitor that had fall detection ('for ages') that automatically messages emergency services for you?

There are none (but you know this).

Samsung is going to implement it "Sometime early next year" in their currently shipping version.

Garmin. You know, the brand that is 100x more popular among bicyclists.

several garmin watches have had this feature since May (I think) of this year, requiring a paired garmin compatible phone, actively running garmin app, to work; sends text to selected contact about “incident.” Doesn’t appear to contact emergency services.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/featured-2/safety-and-trac...

The 2015 Garmin Edge Explore 1000 bike computer has this feature. By all accounts it was/is implemented poorly and triggers erroneously all the time. If they'd made it call the emergency services they'd have got in a lot of trouble.

Apple don't deserve any credit for the idea but deserve something for doing it well.

If there's one thing Apple does well is reinventing the "wheel". Every single one of their product seems to be an improved iteration over some predecessor, I don't have any Apple devices though, I might be wrong.

This reads as though Apple did it first: https://fortune.com/2019/01/07/garmin-vivoactive-cellular-sm...

Poor wording I suppose. My garmin is prior to that one, and has fall detection by using my phone via Bluetooth. Not sure who had it first, but definitely before that 2019 Verizon model.

Kinda. The part that they're referring to is it being Garmin's first device with cellular capability. But it's definitely vague around fall monitoring too.

I'm referring to this sentence, which has nothing to do with cellular capability:

> Like the latest Apple Watch, which has a built-in fall detection system, the new Garmin watch also has a safety monitoring feature, which the company calls incident detection.

My garmin watch has it, ~3 yr old tech

Huawei is much better than Apple. Half the price for many new features. It's a matter of time before Huawei catch up on Apple with Chinese ingenuity

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