COLUMN
Nobody likes a
Smartwatch
IF THE OPPOSITE OF
A
pple is trying to convince you that
your watch is stupid. My watch, a
Swatch, made using impressive yet
affordable Swiss technology, tells the time
really reliably, using a complex array of
springs, gears and whatever else watches
have inside them.
When a person is smart, you generally would say, “that person
really knows what time it is”.
Well my watch really knows
what time it is too, which
is more than I can say for
myself. In fact, it’s precisely
my inability to know what time
it is that caused me to buy it
in the first place. But according to Apple, my watch isn’t
smart enough. If they have their
way, I would buy their Apple Watch
instead, because Apple claim their
watch is much smarter than mine.
Once upon a time, before
smartphones, phones
were kind of useless.
They couldn’t tell you
the weather, help you
work out which way
north is or double up
as a torch. They had no
application when it came to
social networking, unless you
mean in the old fashioned sense
of the term ‘social networking’, i.e.
having a conversation with another
person on the phone. You couldn’t spend
six out of eight hours a working day playing
Candy Crush on it, all the while drawing a salary from the unsuspecting company you work
for. It was tough back then in the dark ages.
And yet, you could use those phones to call
people and talk to them. This is something
IN THE FUTURE, WILL WE HAVE
TO RECHARGE OUR WATCHES
BECAUSE WE SPENT TOO MUCH
TIME FACEBOOKING ON THEM?
SMART IS SIMPLE,
THEN HE’LL CHOOSE
A SIMPLE WATCH
OVER A SMARTWATCH
ANY DAY OF
THE WEEK,
writes Deep Fried Man.
that gets a bit lost in translation when it
comes to today’s phones. First of all, I mostly
have no battery left on my phone due to using
it to play Candy Crush, and then people have
to leave me voicemail messages, rendering
it about as smart as a landline phone in the
1980s with an answering machine. Secondly,
no-one can ever hear me, and I can never
hear them, because Cell C. I must confess I
sometimes miss the cheap Nokia I used to
have, which excelled only at making calls and
playing snake.
And that’s how I feel about the Apple Watch,
and smartwatches in general. Am I a Luddite,
someone who hates technology and wishes
we could all go back to riding horse drawn
carriages and sending telegrams, just because I like my watch the way it is now?
In the future, will we have to recharge our
watches because we spent too much time
Facebooking on them? Will we have to switch
them off so that we can avoid colleagues who
contact us on Sunday evenings? Will people
at restaurants stop talking to each other
because they are too busy playing with their
watches?
My prediction is that soon, everyone will have
smartphones, but most of them will have
no battery power left by 2 pm each day. I,
however, will keep my old, simple watch, and
so people will ask me the time, and I will tell
them the time. And, as they walk away, they
will correctly think to themselves, ‘that guy
really knows what time it is’.
Photo:
GA Goodman
October 2014 |
47