The Wristwatch Looks For a New Use | Hacker News Reader

The Wristwatch Looks For a New Use

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81 pointsrobg52 comments

I carry a phone that'll tell me the time. But I wear a wristwatch because I can tell the time at a glance. I don't have to dig in my pocket for the phone, open it, and peer at it. I can tell the time while driving, my watch is right there. I can tell the time while jogging without having a phone flapping around in my pocket. I can check the time when my hands are carrying things. I can unobtrusively check the time. I can read the big face with hands on a watch faster than I can read the numerals off of the rather busy face of my phone. The battery on my watch dies once a year. It dies every other day on my phone. I don't have to remember to charge my phone.

I.e. my phone tells the time, but it's a lousy watch.

I'm old, too, and stuck in my ways. So there!

It's not polite to check the time when you're with company, but it's a hell of a lot less rude to do so on a watch than a phone.

I don't know.. When you look at your phone, people can assume you got a message or something. Looking at your watch can really only mean one thing.

I'm okay with people having a schedule and that sometimes they squeeze me in between appointments — all of my friends work or study — but I'm less okay with people engaging in a conversation with other people or checking their email/Facebook/Twitter.

To me checking a message is much more rude than checking the time. It's actively stating "I have more important people to talk to than you".

I don't think it's as rude. If my phone goes off I check because it might genuinely be more important - if I excuse myself from a social conversation because a client website just went offline, I don't think that would be considered rude. (If it was a social message / call, the AFK interaction obviously gets priority)

That's one of my main problems with cell phones in general. We're still (behaviorally) used to in-home phones, where people call less frequently and more importantly, so interrupting your current task to answer it made sense. Now, social calls are frequent, and people still interrupt whatever they're doing to answer the phone. They're artificially high priority.

I let everyone know that phones, with me, are low priority - I have an answering machine. Call logs. I can see who you are and when you called whenever I have time - call me twice if it's actually important.

But I'll still check my phone to see who's calling me when it rings, because doing so is such a minor interruption and might be important and not everyone will try again - I'll probably pick up if a hospital or police department calls me. It's not saying "I have more important people to talk to than you", it's saying "Talking with you is not the most important thing that can possibly exist at this time", which is true and expectable - wouldn't you like to know ASAP if your family is in the hospital?

"But I wear a wristwatch because I can tell the time at a glance."

Incidentally, this is one of the main advantages of not wearing a wristwatch - I'm less stressed about the time.

I do wear a wristwatch when jogging though.

I never wear a wristwatch so I don't stress about time and rarely ever have. I'm generally always early, which makes me even less stressed about time.

You're hired!

The wristwatch is jewelry. Its primary purposes are adornment and display of wealth.

Your gadget just has to be cooler and more ostentatious than one of my present wristwatches. It's not about being useful. You don't have to do a better job of telling time, or run applications, or try to supplant my phone.

Agreed, watches are no longer for keeping time. Phones have long taken over that role.

In fact, my watch still gets worn after the battery died. (Hard to explain, but the OLED time shows up after a button press http://www.google.com/images?q=DZ7080)

(Tired counterexample to an overbroad generalization:)

I'm 22, and I wear a wristwatch. I wear an expensive wristwatch, actually, that's solar powered, radio synchronized, has a barometer, etc. If I had a wristwatch that merely told the time, however, I might not bother.

(As another counterpoint)

I'm 21 and I usually wear a wristwatch. I wear an expensive wristwatch, actually. All it does is tell the time. It isn't solar powered, it doesn't synchronize with a server somewhere based on nuclear time, it doesn't even have a chronometer. If it had more features and did something other than tell the time, however, I might not bother.

I'm 22, and I think we have the same watch. I wear it merely as a fashion statement, and indeed to quickly check the time. That's it.

Mine plays pong as an easter egg though.

A purely mechanical wristwatch is a marvelous thing. I frequently use my phone to tell time, but when my Nexus One battery went dead on a long flight recently I was glad to have the spring-powered backup on my wrist.

That doesn't look like any version of Doom I've ever played.

It's more like Wolfenstein 3D, without the enemies, the objects, the guns, or the wall textures.

I guess these people never played Doom.

> It's more like Wolfenstein 3D, without the enemies, the objects, the guns, or the wall textures.

It reminds me of the maze screensaver from Windows 95, without the wall textures or the objects.

If they added enemies, objects, and guns, they'd have Faceball 2000, an FPS for the Game Boy that supported deathmatch mode (wasn't called that then, of course).

I've never really figured out why wear a wristwatch. I think I last had one when I was in elementary school, early 90's. By high school I had dropped the habit.

I don't care about glamorous shiny and expensive things, so that's no reason to wear a watch, really.

I rarely need to check the time and whenever I do, I can usually just see it somewhere: the city is full of clocks, especially the places where you might want to know the time, like tram stops and subway stations.

When I'm at work my computer conveniently tells me the time so that I can appear at a meeting roughly on time.

If I really, really need to have the time then I can use my cellphone. Well, I don't have my cellphone with me all the time, so I can't always do that either. Especially if I'm going alone and have no rendezvous coming up, I don't have it.

If I'm cycling around on a summer day, that's usually without the watch I don't have and without the cellphone I don't want to carry with me, so I can usually tell when it will soon be the evening and to turn my heading back to home.

A few times I've just asked for the time. That's quite as low-tech as it goes.

I actually just recieved my Sony LiveView in the mail today. Worn like a watch, it's more of a phone accessory than anything else. I can get updates as to phone calls, messages, and twitter, all without pulling out my phone which is usually buried in my pocket or in my jacket pocket.

The wrist is prime real estate for devices now. If apple didn't have a plan for this, I'd be shocked.

And our team is usually right here on HN (alright, maybe a bit too often). Let us know if you have any questions about inPulse.

I recently spent $1500 on a NOMOS Tangente wristwatch. The Tangente is a manual-wind, mechanical wristwatch with an in-house movement. Based on the comments I've seen so far, most of you will think I'm crazy.

I bought it partially because I just wanted a nice watch (the jewelry factor), but also because I didn't want to dig around in my pocket for my phone.

"But it's less accurate than a quartz watch!"

True, but absolute accuracy is not what I was going for when I bought the watch. When I look at it I'm looking more for the general position of the minute hand than exactly what minute it's on.

I find the ticking it makes to be calming and the exhibition back fascinating to look at. Taking 10 seconds in the morning to wind it to me is an enjoyable part of getting ready each day.

I'm sure some, or even many people will still think I'm crazy. C'est la vie.

Just today I was thinking again about how I wanted to find a watch that would make me happy. I have felt all my life that watches are unfortunate devices which shackle us to schedules, Time, work, etc. But since I'll be graduating and starting a job soon, there may be some semi-legitimate use for one. Checking cell phones for the time isn't ideal, though it generally suffices.

I traditionally gravitate towards nice analog watches and nothing else, the slimmer and less outrageous the better. If I were to buy something else, I might consider something zanier - like a watch that only told me the cycle of the moon - but I'm not sure what kind of statement I want to make. I find myself therefore caught in between two worlds of watch-wearing...

I spent the better part of the last decade without a wristwatch, mainly because I thought my phone was good enough.

However, about 2 years ago I reverted back to wearing a watch. I went with a Swatch Skin... extremely minimalist & thin watch that weighs almost nothing. As one of my friends described it, "it's not really a watch, but more like just having the time on your wrist".

I've really enjoyed not having to dig out my phone to check the time. I used to think the convenience was trivial and there was no reason to wear a watch... but I'm pretty sure I was wrong.

Wow, congrats to the InPulse team!

Some have attacked Kurzweil for considering his prediction that "People will be wearing computers in the form of jewelry and clothing" [1] as a successful prediction. But, if he wasn't correct in precise time, he certainly will be in form.

[1] http://singularityhub.com/2010/01/19/kurzweil-defends-predic...

The Casio calculator watch, among others, has been around for a long time now: http://www.amazon.com/Casio-CA53W-1-Twincept-Databank-Ani-Di...

In fairness to those criticizing Kurzweil, the timing of his predictions _does_ matter, because he's arguing that technological growth is a fast exponential, leading to super-human intelligence by 2040 or so. So if he's off by 5 years on wearable computers, he might be off by 40 years in his ultimate prediction, or growth might be an s-curve instead of an exponential.

Sloppy reasoning. "Past results are no guarantee of future performance."

No, I really think that Kurzweil's claims of a technological singularity within our lifetime are extraordinary enough that he should be held to very strict standards of timing and prediction. Good grief, the man eats strange nutritional supplements by the handful in hope of living an extra 10 or 15 years and thus, by his theories, living forever.

This is just the start of using mobile watches to talk to phones, computers, you name it! These guys have great vision!

I stopped wearing a wristwatch since it is enormously uncomfortable typing on a laptop with one. I still keep one in my coat pocket, but I rarely use it anymore.

I wish I could get a nice, cheap pocket watch like the ones they used to use with a three piece suit.

I have been carrying a pocket watch for over a decade. They need not be that expensive; I bought one as a gift a couple of years ago for about £25 (~USD40). I guess it depends on the amount of niceness you require. They are readily available on the high street where I live, or on the net of course, so go and have a look.

I don't think that wristwatches are going away any time soon, due to their convenience factor, but they probably will accumulate more functionality and could be used in future as a digital wallet, a P2P data server or a phone.

Since I know that both teams are lurking here:

If an inPulse watch had an accelerometer and could double as a WakeMate (connected to their iPhone app and website, etc.) it would be great.

Just sayin'...

another hacker watch ( $49 )

"The eZ430-Chronos is a highly integrated, wearable wireless development system that comes in a sports watch. It may be used as a reference platform for watch systems, a personal display for personal area networks, as a wireless sensor node for remote data collection, or simply as a watch."

http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-Chronos

Somebody has ported Google two-factor to it: http://tnhh.net/pancake/chronos-otp.xml

A week ago I got my first Android phone. One thing that my Nokia N86 did better was that I could hit the button on my headset and say, "What time is it?".

Called me old fashioned, or lazy, but I hate reaching into my pocket just to check the time. A Casio watch fits the bill perfectly.

I've had the chance to play with these watches, and I'm seriously impressed. This is going to be huge.

I'd be very happy with a watch that displayed what Growl displays on my laptop.

In an utterly opposite-topic vein, I've recently discovered the joy of automatic, mechanical watches. No battery, no electronics, no manual winding. They're just a spring, gears, and a rotor that 'charges' the spring when you move your arm.

Sure, I have a mobile, but I feel a bit silly digging in my pocket when I just want to check the time. Plus, there aren't many non-tacky forms of jewelry for men. Finally, there's just something neat about a completely mechanical solution which is simultaneously old-tech (concept) and high-tech (execution).

Searching for "Seiko 5" on Amazon turns up a lot of options, and the core mechanism has been around since the 1960s. My absolute favorite automatics are the Seiko SKX007 and 009 dive watches, which seem to be unrivaled in value for money.

I'm very curious if this old-tech option appeals to the 20-somethings as much as it does to me, a guy who grew up when digital watches and (gasp) calculator watches were the coolest thing on the planet.

I have a self-winding watch in a drawer. I abandoned it because it wasn't accurate. I had to reset the time every day. I love the cheap quartz watch I have. Big face, big hands, can tell the time without my glasses on, incredibly accurate, $20, with a button for a backlight.

The Seikos are supposed to be accurate to within +/- 5-10 seconds per day. You can't beat quartz, though.

So it's off by half an hour to an hour over a year? That's pretty shoddy accuracy if you ask me, especially in an era where clocks accurate to the second are ubiquitous and cheap.

Sure, if you never adjust your watch for a year. The whole point is how amazingly accurate it is for a sub-$200, purely mechanical timekeeping device. Besides, it's pretty common for super-accurate quartz watches to become wildly inaccurate about once per year (dead battery)...

I think that there is a very strong appeal in the high-tech, vanguard crowd of HN and the like for mechanical things of this nature - this is echoed in the fanbase for steampunk, for example.

Personally, if I were to get a new watch (I haven't worn one in years, and am a current college student) I'd want a nice analog watch - digital watches are quite passe, unless you go extremely avant-garde, in which case they're rather much of a statement.

'Orient', which I believe owned by Seiko, also makes nice inexpensive mechanical watches.

I'm also a fan of mechanical watches. When I was a kid I used to take them apart and mend them - something taught by my grandfather. However, mechanical watches are more about fashion or collectability than they are utilitarian.

Not sure how they could be more utilitarian... it tells you the time which is what watches are suppose to do. They type the parent is talking about is very accurate as well from my experience as well.

I am a twenty-something and the idea of a watch that never needs winding and keeps good time definitely appeals to me. For something so basic, reliability trumps flashiness - and on the engineering appeal, it's far more impressive and elegant than any digital watch (to me, a complex system of interlocking gears is less understandable, and so more awe-inspiring, than a watch that is also a computer. Big deal, I already have a computer!)

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