The friend was impressed. The others at the table were too.
This is life with the next big thing in tech strapped to your wrist.
My piece of technological wonderment is small and black and helps tell time like a watch. That’s because it technically is a watch, in principle, but it’s not like any you’ve ever seen. And it’s a whole lot more than just that.
Meet the Pebble, a piece of wearable tech that is part of an ever-expanding yet-to-be-released line of products lumped into the 21st-century category of “smartwatch.” The term implies, of course, that all other watches that came before are technophobic Neanderthals, capable only of ticking away the seconds toward their eventual irrelevance.
Several months ago, I was incredulous and scornful of the idea that anyone could honestly attempt to argue that emailing was a time- and labor-intensive process. Now, after reading the above article, which teeters vertiginously on the ledge of self-parody, it seems obvious to me that I’ve actually been observing something strangely akin to the famous paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, in which ever-shrinking divisions of time are proportionately overhyped in a futile attempt to close the distance on a life containing meaning and significance.
March 25, 2013 @ 5:42 pm
Fellow luddite says:
http://lhote.blogspot.com/2013/03/personality-hunger-and-regulation-of.html
March 25, 2013 @ 8:16 pm
I watched a woman idly poking away at a tablet while sitting in DMV a few weeks ago. I tried to have my girlfriend explain to me what need, exactly, a tablet fills in between smartphone and laptop. She explained something about there being a sort of status-gap between the laptoppers and tableters (the latter being mere "consumers" and not "content-creators", apparently), but I'm not sure I'm any closer to resolving my original befuddlement.
March 27, 2013 @ 2:21 pm
Confession: I have an iphone, ipad, laptop, and Kindle (Until a few years ago, I didn't even have a cell phone). There are reasons – boring reasons: the laptop was issued at work (I don't like it), the iphone is subsidized by Randy's work (it's great), the Kindle was just $80, fits in a pocket and can be read in the sun, and the iPad was purchased so I could goof off during professional development workshops without being too obvious.
March 27, 2013 @ 9:13 pm
I use a smartphone for work, but it's just another tool that additionally allows me to check for any important emails while I'm away from home. At one job, we have to carry a tablet for scanning a handful of barcodes — ridiculous overkill. They're bulky and inconvenient, but apparently it has something to do with a board member who owns stock in the scanning software, kickbacks, same old bullshit.
I see where some of the cheesy disposable fantasy fiction I like to read is only being released on e-readers now, so it's likely that I'll eventually get a Kindle or Nook for that purpose. I can certainly see advantages to them, but I'm just one of those who really enjoys the book-as-object beyond the question of convenience.
Freddie's comment on how absurd it is that Ries is reduced to harping on the few seconds saved by no longer having to actually lift your smartphone (oh, my arm!) to read a text message as the main selling point made was dead-on and funny. It made me think of the scene from There's Something About Mary:
Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the excercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7… Minute… Abs.
Ted: Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Ted: You guarantee it? That's – how do you do that?
Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".
Ted: That's right. That's – that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?
[Hitchhiker convulses]
Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted: That – good point.