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Comment by motti_s | Hacker News Reader

As a gadget freak and a hacker, I love this product. But I wonder how many people use a watch these days. Of course this is no ordinary watch, but when you have a supercomputer (in the shape of a phone) in your pocket, is it really needed? I suppose it's great for sports, but I'm not sure whether it has mass market potential (selling ~10K in a few hours is amazing, but isn't mass market yet). I'm actually on the fence with this one...

In general I think that watches will make a comeback only if they become the phone. Maybe Pebble will be well positioned to do that in the future (remember iPod -> iPhone?).

BTW It's nice to see a hardware company coming out of YC. Also nice to know that Eric is from Vancouver. Good luck Pebble! I'll buy one as soon as I stop being a starving bootstrapper.

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To us the iPhone is a powerful computing device. But I think the truth is that most people who buy an iPhone, are really buying a fashion item. How many apps do most people actually have installed? And how many of them do they use regularly? Not a lot.

Now, people who wear watches these days also are also doing so to be fashionable. This is why I think this has mass market potential.

Most people watch video's and surf the web even without installing apps. This takes a lot more processing power than you might think. What they don't use is the GPU, but that's a small fraction of the cost of an iPhone.

Yes yes, no one actually uses apps because the iPhone is just a fashion item.

That is why Angry Birds has sold millions and licensed their IP for physical products and a movie. That's why Instagram is a $1bn company.

Bullshit.

I think the cool idea is you can get notifications/interact with your phone, without taking it out.

For me, the big win is the vibration motor - I never feel my phone when it vibrates in my pocket.

I find the use of cell phones as pocket watches tacky. As a grad student, I've seen many speakers come in and open a cell phone in the middle of a talk to check their time usage, which I find utterly unacceptable.

Depending on your situation, look around a bit and see who's wearing a watch. It may not be the norm anymore, but it's still not an unusual thing to do at all. If nothing else, they are a good fashion accessory.

Don't you think 'utterly unacceptable' is a just little harsh, remembering that technology, fashion, and language are not fixed things and are always changing. I think it is quite acceptable that mobile phones have replaced wrist watches. Or maybe we should go back to giving lectures in a top hat and monocle, and checking our time usage with a fob watch? ;)

It's not the change in fashion that I'm taking issue with. Standing in front of a group of people with your attention fixed on a communication device is not good presentation. If it were glancing down at a clock sitting on a podium or table, that would be fine. This is not how it happens in practice. The biggest difference between a cell phone and a watch or other timepiece on a surface is that a cell phone requires interaction to extract the time. The extent of that interaction really doesn't matter. It goes from a momentary action of pulling a phone out and pressing a wake button to a nervous speaker confounded by a single button press and a screen too dim to see without making a spectacle of the action. This is the more common of the cell phone users I witness. The trouble is that every minute thing a speaker does is on display and just as a speaker expects (or hopes for) respect from the audience, I as an audience member expect the speaker to be attentive and professional.

So can it be done gracefully without my ire? Probably. I have yet to be pleasantly surprised.

I normally wear a watch, but still use my phone's stopwatch to keep time during a talk. I find that looking at a stopwatch during a presentation requires less mental distraction than: (i) keeping track of the time at which my talk started (I am talking about conference talks where the talks usually start a few minutes later than the scheduled time), (ii) looking at the current time and calculating how much time is remaining (it usually takes less than a second, but it is more time consuming that a tap on my phone).

The trick is to disable your phone's auto lock, open the stop watch and run it. That way, you can just tap the screen (I am assuming iphone like smart phone) to see the current time. I think this can be done as discreetly as checking my watch.

The biggest advantage of using a stopwatch is that it provides evidence of how long you have been speaking for. I have had cases where the previous speaker overshot his/her time and a session chair tried to get back on time by cutting time from my talk. In such cases, I have had to point to my stopwatch to say that I still have more than five minutes left. (Usually the talks are twenty minutes, so having five less minutes is a big deal). This (a session chair punishing me for the previous speaker's tardiness) has happened twice to me in the last year.

I recently used a pointer/controller with stopwatch that seemed to be this one: http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-2-4-Cordless-Presenter-Black/...

It was loaned, I had no idea it was so expensive. Good design, though. The stopwatch can be 'pumped up' in 5 minute increments to the time for one's talk. All there, nothing else to fiddle with.

It can be a communication device.

But when you look down at it to check time it is just a time-piece (like the old days).

Slight off topic, but I am always puzzled how most conference rooms fail to have a large clock at the back of the room such that a speaker can easily see how they are tracking for time.

If not at the back of the room, a large display at the foot of the stage facing the speaker - the way TED talks display the time to the speaker.

If meeting rooms can remember to embed projectors and speakers in a room, putting a clock on the back wall can't be that difficult.

It’s no different to pulling out a pocket-watch (although, granted, a pocket-watch is a little more stylish).

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