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Mugge
Thunderbolt, fuck yeah!
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Denmark
 
2013-02-02, 08:42

Ok, so right now the world is all about the smartphone and AAPL is down because Wall Street doesn't believe that Apple will come up with another revolutionary product. Let's just begin with noting that Apple does not come up with revolutionary products, but merely perfects existing products and wipe out the earlier implementations of said products.

There are two gadgets that to me look like promising new form factors for the next step: The Pebble smart watch and Google's glasses.

The idea of a smart watch or a watch phone is not new, but so far the implementations have been falling short of what would be needed to supersede the smart phone. The existing watch phones are basically dumb phone in a wrist watch and the Pebble is actually just a Bluetooth peripheral to a smart phone. None of them are self contained smart phones as would be needed to supersede the present smart phones. The form factor also have some challenges that needs to be addressed before I think it can succeed. The main problem seems to be the very small screen size which is a pretty big disadvantage considering that smart phones are mostly interacted with though the screen. There are also some other issues, such as where to put the speaker for phone calls, but these things can be worked out by clever engineering.

Google Glasses seems to answer the screen question, and adds some neat possibilities for augmented reality. But if you feel that wearing a Bluetooth earpiece makes you look dorky then these glasses are going to make you cringe. Yet in terms of functionality, I suspect that Google might be on to something, but if it's enough to overcome the dork factor, I don't know. And then there's the whole issue of having Google constantly lurking the same things as you see as Im quite convinced that at least Google's implementation of smart glasses will be relying heavily on cloud connection.

I myself would probably prefer the watch form factor despite the screen size challenge.

What do you guys think?
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