Smartwatches and the three-second rule | Hacker News Reader

Smartwatches and the three-second rule

theverge.com

81 pointsfreerangebat50 comments

Personal Digital Assistants like the Palm Pilot or Pocket PCs or even Apple’s Newton were usually not very useful unless you regularly synced them with your "real" computer. They ranged from very simple and cheap to very expensive — and almost all of them were pretty slow. The most powerful PDAs tried to do way too much and had fairly awful battery life.

Sound familiar?

No, no it doesn't sound familiar at all. Syncing with my desktop was a nice luxury, but not a necessity. More of a back up than anything, the Palm Pilot and Newton were useful as a standalone device (Pocket PC? Eh, not so much).

Slow? Is the author too young to have used such devices and just looking at CPU clock speeds? For the tasks for which it was designed, a Palm Pilot would run rings around any device I use today. Check my task list? A button on the front of the Palm. iOS or Android? Unlock device, search for app icon that hopefully is on the front page. Tap icon, wait for it to load and then go find it's "cloud store", bunch of back-and-forth while the two sync, then you can use the app. Now, the difference is pretty small on modern mobile CPUs and LTE, but the Palm still wins and certainly is not comparatively slow.

Awful battery life? Now the author is just making shit up. A Newton would run for weeks on some AA batteries. I've got one on my shelf that hasn't been turned on in a year. I'd bet a paycheck that I could grab it today, hit the button and it would power up. Try that with your iXuslaxy 12 in 12 months time. Don't recall good numbers on the Palm, but I can guarantee you that I wouldn't abide putting a new pair of AAs in it on a daily basis, so I'll assume it would run for multiple days or weeks on some batteries. Pretty sure early Pocket PCs needed to be charged daily...just like modern mobile devices, so that's a wash and a long way away from "awful battery life".

No, I didn't finish the article with that opening salvo.

Amusingly enough he then praises the Palm later. I think if he replaced that opening bit with "early smartphones, like windows 6.5 smartphones" it would be dead-on. Well, except the syncing thing. That's still bs.

So I went back and finished the article. The problem with his opening paragraph is that it is his premise for the rest of the article. And the truth is not "smartwatches are too slow/battery-hungry/useless", it's that they try to do too much. The author does use the Pebble as an example, and that's what he should have gone with. The Pebble is the Palm of smartwatches: simple, good battery life, pretty snappy, and doesn't try to overreach (much). I'm happy with mine, and the reason this Apple "fanboy" doesn't have an Apple Watch is because: battery-hungry, slow, and tries to do too much for too much money.

From where I sit, most companies are trying to put a "computer on my wrist" when I'm really quite content with a "display on my wrist" (Pebble, mostly) until we can sort out the power management and optimizations needed to make "computer on my wrist" a workable product.

Precisely this. You summed up why I love my Pebble too. It's a watch first and foremost, with a few handy gadgets. Rather than a smartphone on my wrist fashioned like a watch.

The original Pebble seemed interesting. This new one with the whole timeline concept seems over-designed.

Poses the general question, which approach is "better"? The focused tool is more efficient and easier to understand, but things tend toward convergence of previous separate functions.

Is it the way of the world that we start with focused tools to introduce a concept, and turn it into a feature of another product to gain mass acceptance? What then pushes the gravity of convergence toward one device or another?

I have a Palm IIIxe and it lasted months on a pair of AAA (not AA) batteries. (Still have it but don't use it. Can't believe I used to keep it in my pocket. It's huge by today's standards.)

I still have my Handspring visor edge. I vaguely remember writing some software for it, but I clearly remember it running for more than two weeks on a single charge. Desktop sync probably would have been a higher priority if it had needed to be recharged more than twice a month.

The Palm with the color screen, and Internet access was great! Forget the name, but it still works, and sitting in a drawer. Too lazy to walk over.

It was around $300.00

It saved me so much money. I used to go to liquidation sales. In one instance, I needed to find what 900 units of Halo III The collector's edition were selling for on eBay. They were going for $40-$50 bucks. I bought all the games at $5 a piece. The other buyers thought I was crazy.

No one had smart phones. I really thought I finally had a tool to get ahead in life. Libraries offered free internet access without logging in, and it seemed wherever I was, someone had an open wifi I could connect to. This little Palm always had internet access, or though it seemed? I remember thinking about a smart phone, and couldn't bring myself to pay for data?

I blinked, about 9 months went by, and it seemed like everyone was on a smart phone. It was nice while it lasted.

As to the device, I don't think they marketed it the right way.

I still think the Palm, all of them, were great little devices. I remember hooking one up to a gps. I took it down the Rogue River, so I could be prepared for any rapids greater than 3. It kinda worked, but need fine tuning. It wasen't Palms fault; I didn't have the right maps loads.

Just looked for the devise, and can't find it.

Palm products were great. They, along with the accessories were make well. It's ashame what happened to that company.

I can't shake the feel that Verge is basically a lifestyle magazine for "geeks". Thus self-expression and entertainment is valued way above utility.

And the mentioned devices were utility first and foremost (aka "nerdy").

Agreed. When The Verge first started, I was impressed with their content. It seemed generally well thought out and researched. Since Joshua Topolsky left, a lot of what (and who) had made the site great has disappeared, replaced with half thought out opinion pieces and trendy fluff.

I do also miss 90 seconds on The Verge.

(Off topic: other then Ars Technica and Anandtech, are there any sites people recommend for good tech writing and news?)

I don't get why people hold Topolsky in such high regards.

And i have given up on Ars technica these days.

> Personal Digital Assistants like the Palm Pilot or Pocket PCs or even Apple’s Newton were usually not very useful unless you regularly synced them with your "real" computer.

Having actually used one of those devices at that time, I can tell you it was extremely useful. For the first time, I had a full contacts list, calendar, and memos list, and I could take those anywhere with me. And the calendar would beep me a while before events. That was fantastic.

You have to understand, back then the comparison term for these things was nothing. Nada. Zip. Cell phones were just getting started, and they had few or none of these features.

That little Palm Pilot was an incredibly useful device. Sure, it sucks when you compare it to a modern smartphone.

Yeah, I don't understand that criticism of PDAs. PDAs were extremely popular for a time (until they were obsoleted by ubiquitous cell phones). Palm sold something like 30 million pilots. They were highly useful, incredibly desirable, and thus very popular. Were most of those 30 million palm pilot owners syncing them to their computers regularly? I doubt it. The PDA was like a notebook that you could take anywhere and was searchable with an enormous capacity compared to a typical paper notebook. It replaced "little black books", pocket organizers, pocket calendars, and pocket notebooks and did a pretty good job of it.

Yep. I had a Pilot 1000 and a Palm V. I rarely synced it with my computer except to back things up. Frankly, the syncing with Linux was abysmal anyway, and even on Windows, the Palm apps left a lot to be desired; it was actually, in some ways, more functional WITHOUT a computer!

I was in high school when they came out, and I saved my pennies and bought one, and it was GREAT for having a contacts list and keeping track of my calendar and homework todo list. To be honest, I've had a hard time replicating it since then. It was just enough at the cutting edge of technology that I WANTED to use it. These days, I have todo lists in my iPhone, in Evernote, on my whiteboard, on my computer, and I never check ANY of them.

I also don't get the gripe about the screen. Sure, it's worse than we have to day, but I found 160x160 to be just fine.

http://www1.pcmag.com/media/images/245693-palmpilot.jpg

I had a Psion Series 5 in my high school days -- also something I saved my shekels for. The thing was basically the closest you could get to a DOS computer in your pocket with an amazing UI and full on device programmability. The thing had a full keyboard (!) and word processor which I even used to type out whole essays on. The little computer was a work of engineering genius -- even ran for a month on one pair of AA batteries.

To this day, I still have yet to find anything that comes close to that same reliability, stability, or feature standard.

I lusted after the Psion. Well done.

You could compare them to something like the Psion Series 3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3), released in 1991. Possibly not common in America, though, as Psion was a UK company.

Prior to the Series 3, Psion produced the Organizer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Organiser) - I had an Organizer II LZ64, bought in 1990 I think, a birthday present from my parents when I was a young teenager. These were a lot less practical than the Series 3, on account of the teeny tiny screen, but I found mine fun to program on.

I had a Palm Tungsten T (slidy-outy one) and a Palm TX.

I like both of them very much. The TX had an SD card slot. T

I would much rather have something similar today that didn't try to do everything and have a 50 yottapixel display, 9 cameras, and a battery life after 2 years use of about 4 hours.

A Palm style device paired with a 'John's Phone'[1] for calls would be awesome.

Give me a good point and shoot, a good PDA, and a good phone as three separate devices.

1. http://www.johnsphones.com/store/item9

I've used three smartwatches so far: Moto 360, Apple Watch and Samsung Gear S2.

The Samsung is my clear favorite because it has the most watchlike physical design and the best designed software of the three. Considering the reputation Samsung has in software, that was rather shocking (and perhaps speaks more about Google's and Apple's failures).

Android Wear is distressingly non-spatial. Most of the time I felt lost in the UI. I never could figure out if swiping left or right or up would bring me to the same place as it did last time, or (more often) whether I'd be faced with a surprising new screen out of nowhere.

Apple Watch has too many buttons and UI actions. It's rarely obvious what each of them will do, so often I'd just cycle through them all: turn the crown, try long press and force touch, swipe in all directions... The meaning of actions varies arbitrarily (e.g. to set an alarm you must turn the crown and the screen does nothing; in most other apps you specify values by touch actions and the crown does nothing).

The Samsung Gear S2 has a rotating bezel that's much nicer to use than the fidgety crown on the Apple Watch. It also has a clear meaning in the interface: you turn the bezel to scroll through content. That covers a lot of the things you actually do on a smartwatch, and there's no guessing whether you need to swipe in this or that direction instead.

The Samsung is also the fastest of the bunch. Native apps start instantly, whereas Apple Watch will often keep you waiting for 5-10 seconds for an app to start.

My two cents on smartwatches... Supposedly Samsung's Gear software is coming to iOS too (pending Apple approval it seems), so it's shaping up to be a real cross-platform contender.

I just got a gear s2, and I agree with your sentiment. But i had an original Pebble since the Kickstart, and it's way better on everything but looks.

Pebble has one of the best looking watches on the market fwiw, in the Pebble round... Unfortunately it's only IPX7 rated, just "splash resistant", and it has a battery life like all the competitors. So I bought the s2, and it's good enough. But the moment Pebble releases a good looking, round watch that can survive a swimming pool and last like its other models, I'm in.

>in most other apps you specify values by touch actions and the crown does nothing

This was only a minor point in a much bigger comment, but I can't help thinking this is going to change. The alarm app works differently than new third-party apps because Apple made it, and Apple is way better at making Watch apps than third-party devs -- even aside from limitations on the Watch API, it's not surprising that the UI from developers is inconsistent and (right now) favors basically making a little tiny version of an iPhone app, touchscreen and all. I bet this changes in relatively short order, or at least improves to the point that you can get as consistent an experience on the Watch as you'd get between apps on the phone.

I have a Huawei Watch[1]. It's great, and actually looks like a normal - nice looking watch.

It's fast, great battery life (~2 days). I don't find the interface bad (I've never got lost in it like your experience). Not sure if it is the same software as on the G2 - I thought it was standard Android.

I use it for notifications - single glance to see if I should read an email/message.

I haven't worn a watch in years, but I'm really enjoying it.

[1] http://consumer.huawei.com/minisite/worldwide/huawei-watch/

One of our guiding principles when designing experiences on Microsoft Band is to try to limit interaction time. We had an "in and out in 5" rule we designed around.

I'm still not 100% happy with how long some activities take to launch, scrolling over can take time, but I feel that we've worked hard to adhere to this.

I have always admired Palm's for how fast it was possible to access their features. I was the most organized in life when I had a Palm Pilot and I could take it out of my pocket, press one of the front buttons, and see my to-do list pop up in front of me.

In comparison, getting to my to-do list on all smartphone platforms is a multi-step process.

It's amazing how bad, fragmented or non-existent Todo and Memo applications are on the platforms (compared to palm).

Instead of evolving from there it seems like they were largely just dropped or ignored by the modern platforms.

/me uses org-mode

> ...getting to my to-do list on all smartphone platforms is a multi-step process

My Nexus unlocks as I pick it up and my todo list is displayed on and editable from the home screen (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=sk.mildev84.no...). I take notes a lot more often since getting that set up.

One of the best things about W10M is having a shortcut to creating a new OneNote in the pull-down menu. And the hardware camera button.

Not aimed at you, but in and out in 5, or 3 second rules just reinforce why I won't even vaguely consider a smart watch.

Most smart phones are bad enough. I've yet to own a smartphone (mostly android, one iphone) that's as snappy as an old dumbphone like the v8 or v3, where most things are instant. Adding numbers to contacts or even simply browsing contacts feels like a kludge. After 5 years of constant Android use I should never still accidentally call instead of add or view... But I do, so I start to question the interface; and my sanity.

Get battery life to weeks, and a .5s rule, and I'll consider buying one.

Psion should never have stopped making hardware. :)

Forget smart watches, I have yet to use a smart phone that doesn't fail the 3-second rule on nearly every task. Often it's 5 seconds of waiting for the phone to catch up between each and every action (each tap, swipe, etc.), so that just loading a website takes a full minute (plus the time actually required download the requisite data). Half the time, if I'm at home, I'll start doing something on my phone and then decide that walking into the other room to do it on my laptop is going to be faster than waiting for the phone.

I've only used Androids. Is it any better in iOS land?

It is much better in iOS land, but only if you have an iPhone which is <2 generations old. I have an old iPhone 4 that's still in great condition but it's completely unusable. The Uber app takes >5 minutes to start up (I timed it). But my new iPhone 6s is lightning fast... As fast as the 4 was when I first got it -_-

If you are using iOS 8 on the iPhone 4, make sure you turn on "reduce motion" and turn on "reduce transparency" in settings > accessibility > increase contrast. That alone made my iPad 2 go from garbage unusable, to, ok.

Transparency and blur effects seem to be the culprit for most slowness on older devices.

Hmm, I've only used older-generation phones, so it sounds like iOS is in the same boat in that respect.

Pebble is still the only smart watch I've seen that I would (and do) use on a daily basis. It's simple, cheap, super fast, always instantly readable, and gets > a week of life out of a single charge.

There are so many things the pebble does right. I think the best example is the music remote, so let's compare it to the Apple Watch: If I want to skip songs from my Apple Watch I have to lift my wrist, look down at the display, swipe upward, swipe through glances til I find the music player, and then tap the tiny skip button. Forget about doing this while biking. On pebble I hold the up button for half a second and give it a click. I don't even need to look down. The Apple Watch has so many advantages. It's faster, it has tight integration with the iPhone, a gorgeous display with a high refresh rate, and that delightful Taptic thing. And yet the pebble just works better. Apple could learn a lot from this little company.

"And the biggest complaint of all is, of course: it’s too slow."

I really don't think that app being slow is the "biggest problem". App being pointless is a much greater issue, and it's not a problem of being slow. An apple watch is about the same speed as an iphone1, and yet the iphone was an instant success.

What's even more problematic is that even apple can't imagine useful user scenarios in its ads beyond sport session ( guy checking messages while playing the piano in a concert ? I know it's a joke, but it would have been better to come with a real example...). PDA had problems because they weren't able to properly deliver the promises everyone thought about for those devices. Smartwatch don't even have user expecting anything.

My handspring visor delivered a better experience for PDA things than my phone right now. My Palm T5 was better yet (great battery life, played videos, excellent calendaring, and they both were insanely responsive compared to my phone.

I used an old Centro when my android phone was bricked, and while the web browser was worse than crap, many other things were surprisingly refreshing, plus it sipped battery (3 year old battery, ran for about 70 hours on a charge).

I wonder if some of it is that we've hit a level of complexity at which efficient implementations are not as feasible; try counting the number of levels of abstraction in the android OS; there's a lot. Having even 10% of the features and flash that android has, along with a semi-secure sandbox for applications written the way PalmOS was isn't feasible; even Garnet was showing places where the complexity was causing implementation issues.

I really, really like my LG G watch R. Looks pretty much like a regular watch (I've had many people comment that they didn't even realize it was a smartwatch) I've had it for a year and a few months and worn it in the shower, swimming, etc and almost no signs of wear. It's does what I need plenty fast and gets out of the way the rest of the time. If you're in the market for a watch check it out (or the newer Urbane).

My PocketPC screamed. 206MHz ARM was amazing in 2003.

My wife loves her Band. I offered her the new one but she didn't see any reason to upgrade. If the MS Phone platform weren't such a joke, it would have been a gateway to her getting a windows phone. I got her an SGS7 instead.

She's sad she can't use Cortana with her Samsung, but she's not willing to give up everything she likes for that one feature.

You often hear about the yesteryear of Palm Pilots (and Newtons) but I wonder why the Cassiopeia doesn't seem to get the same nostalgia.

The early generation boasted a 640 x 240 screen, ran Windows CE and had a full PCMCIA slot.

But the next generation ditched the "nano-notebook" form factor to imitate Pilot/Newton, which apparently was what everyone wanted.

I had a Casseopeia I bought second hand. The problem I had with it as compared to the Psion Series 5 was simply that it was too power hungry and windows CE was simply not reliable enough. I had cases where alarms would not go off, data corruption, and a battery that lasted at most a day.

I have a similar rule for websites. Unless I really, really need to get the info on a page, I close it immediately if it doesn't show content in 2 seconds. Often it's pages that replace HTML with JavaScript content engines but not necessarily.

I really just want a really small smartphone that I can optionally strap to my wrist.

That's all smartphone/smartwatch manufacturers need to keep in mind when it comes to marketing to me.

The Garmin 235 is compelling.

Does look cool. But a bit pricey. And last I checked, they didn't let you have access to your data on your watch.

As a runner I can say that the Garmin is not pricey from my perspective because it is optimized for running. I got a new Garmin Forerunner to replace my old one even though it's about the same cost as an Apple Watch. I have no interest in buying Apple Watch because I would need to carry an iPhone while running, and I have no interest in strapping this big clunky phone to my arm when running.

The biggest problem with the smartwatch is the 3-5 second hang in the conversation when a user gets an alert and robotically pauses mid-word to check it..... then looks back at you.... blinks.. remembers what they were saying, and continue on.

I'm not the kind of person gripe about "kids these days and their technology" but I've found the watch to be a real issue.

A phone could have the same issue? If someone is unable to wait a few seconds to finish a sentence, ask for a moment and check if it is important, than I think that is not the watches problem and a problem that would come up via other devices anyway.

Depends on what you do as well. If you're a Google SRE that's on call and you get the familiar alert, you're probably going to check right away.

Could, but I've almost NEVER noticed it with phones, and I notice it every single alert with smartwatch wearers. It's like a pavlovian response. With phones, people either wait to take it out of their pocket, or they do so as they speak. I'm not sure why the wrist action causes them to pause mid-word. It's extremely strange.

Granted my sample size is small; just a few folks I know at work and personally who have them. It's uncanny though.

Well I have noticed worse with phones. People having their phones out during a conversation and starting to reply or look at something on their phone while "listening" to me talk. This was at school, however during the summer when I work people with smartwatches I would notice would typically excuse themselves if they noticed an important phone call or message they had to deal with. They would always finish talking though before they even checked if it was important though, unless it was buzzing like a phone call.

But like you said, this is also my personal experience and my school and work environment may be much different than yours, and even have a different kind of cultural approach.

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