Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaysonelliot | Hacker News Reader

I, too, love my Pebble, if only for the convenience of getting text and call notifications on my wrist.

I'm surprised at how poorly thought-out the UI is, and particularly surprised at how little control I have over it, at least out of the box.

For the moment, there's no way to invert the screen color, no way to view text or call history (even to the point of seeing a notification if you accidentally press the wrong button and dismiss it), not even a battery life indicator that I've been able to find.

Eventually, as developers start getting apps on the Pebble, and as Pebble themselves work on the UI, I have faith it will improve. As the author says, this is what it's like in early adopter land.

One thing the Pebble has convinced me of is that smart watches will be a popular product category in the near future. There's just too much potential, and even my very basic, very early-stage Pebble has already become one of my favorite gadgets.

View on HN

If smart watches take off, it will be when Apple releases theirs.

Technology has taken off in the past without Apples influences (netbooks, IPTV, I'd even argue that smartphones and MP3 players too - though Apple did lead the charge in their re-invention which further popularised them).

Plus it seems a little presumptuous to make such a definitive statement when given Apple's watch is only a rumour and how unreliable Apple rumours are at the best of times.

Netbooks? How'd that work out for the industry?

Pretty good - people got to realise that they didn't need 3.8 GHz machines to browse the web and read email. Something much smaller would do. You don't need cd / dvd rom. You don't need 8 GB of ram. You don't need huge screens.

The form factor was lousy, but by the time they realised that they had cranked up smart phones. A big smart phone is really just a smaller netbook.

Rather well actually. It's funny how short some peoples memories are, but netbooks were very well received.

Popular enough that Intel rushed through some low powered x86 designs for fear of ARM taking off.

Popular enough that Microsoft rushed through changes to Windows XP (both in terms of software code and licensing) for fear of Linux taking off.

In fact they were so successful that complaints were often made against Apple for having no such device (this of course was before the MacBook Air and iPad. Neither of which are netbooks -obviously- but between the two they covered enough of the form factor to keep most of the complainer quiet).

Granted the demand for netbooks have since fizzled out, but they were hugely successful at the time and did the start of the popularisation of users switching away from heavy "powerhouse" hardware to more portable devices for lighter work loads. Credit for which belongs largely to ASUS and the EeePC, which was basically the first consumer netbook - though similar hardware was being built by the One Laptop Per Child scheme - amongst others.

It's also worth noting that ASUS never sued Acer and other OEMs over pathetic design patents over netbooks. And how Diamond Multimedia never sued Apple over portable music players (one could argue the original iPod shared a lot of similarities with the Rio PMP00[1]).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300

It's not short memory, Apple blogs have been waging a campaign against netbooks since their heyday, just like they wage campaigns against phones bigger than 4 inches and tablets smaller than 10", TV boxes with support for keyboards, styluses, royalty-free video codecs etc. etc. Basically if Apple isn't in the market (yet) then it needs to be torn down, otherwise Apple looks bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com