I think folding phones will remain a small niche unless someone figures out how to make a foldable screen that doesn't get permanently scratched by your fingernails.
- mobile mp3 player sales are low unless disk and battery life are greatly improved
- large display touch screen phone market is small unless someone solves the "app problem"
- smart watch market is tiny if exists at all unless someone makes one that is useful and has improved battery life
Every smartwatch that hasn't met that bar, which is almost all of them ever made, is a joke to me. I'd have ordered a RePebble had I not moved back to analogue dumbwatches instead just before they were announced (and were iOS not actively hostile to competing watch implementations).
But if you want to leave your smartphone at home, but you still want cellular and notifications, I agree the apple watch is the only game in town even if the battery life sucks.
I agree that Apple Watches don't last long enough between charges, but comparing them to a completely different class of device that's technically the same broad category is pointless.
A side effect is that this makes your watch look less new, and therefore less of a theft target.
the camp that sees the smartwatch as an accessory to their smartphone that does fitness tracking and maybe a few other useful things to avoid pulling their phone out constantly - those people want MUCH longer battery life.
the camp that sees the smartwatch as a REPLACEMENT to their smartphone, they are perfectly fine with the current battery life.
2. Just for general convenience, having to take another special cable for every late night or overnight trip is maddening. I always have a phone anyway for any actual interactions.
I find it hard to believe many people are writing texts on their watches, it's just a nice to have gimmick feature that everyone I know has stopped using.
That has not been my experience though - having used both an Apple Watch and a Pixel Watch for years on end every single day. Absolutely outside my area of expertise, but I would imagine that you can design batteries to have a much longer lifetime (no of recharge cycles) when their capacity is smaller.
You are brushing your teeth for like half that alone.
OLED is just the wrong screen tech for these devices, never made any sense to me given how little I care about graphics and how little time I spend reading the display.
Especially considering how useful sleep data is, then I was surprised to see they're only getting sleep scores now.
My dirt cheap Huawei watches have had this for years. It's accurate enough (my own perception based on use). And I get a weeks battery life too (although I don't have the distracting fancy notifications perhaps). It does check blood oxygen levels, heart rate, stress etc.
I truly thought this was a solved problem (looking at headphones battery life, although I might need to check my assumptions here also apply to Airpods).
> I truly thought this was a solved problem.
I charge when showering in the morning. 15 minutes is enough for the day + night, half an hour to charge it fully.
In other words, if they made the battery last twice as long it'd still be equally as annoying (since your daily routine would be nearly the same, except now you also need to remember if it's a charge day or non-charge day).
To be fair maybe 3/4 days buys you some convenience. But anyways charging once a day is a reasonable place to get to, to get something better would require at minimum a 3x improvement which probably means a ground-up rework instead of continuous refinement.
A battery band might get you there but I suspect it'd be too clunky. At best Apple may redesign their watch to support a battery band and allow 3rd parties to make them for folks that need weeks of battery life.
The other issue is that I don't want to have to bring Yet Another Dongle™ every time I go away for a weekend or short business trip. Most of my trips are ≤ 4 days, so if AWs could reliably go that long (including battery degradation over time) then I'd consider getting one.
Right now, only the AWU even approaches this, and only in low-power mode. If it weren't a thousand dollars, I'd consider it. But between the low-power requirement and the pricing, it's just no contest in my book. I'm getting a new Pebble, which offers a month of battery life at 1/3 of the cost.
I think reverse charging from your smartphone is a quite decent solution to the problem, which is supported by certain Android devices.
The breakthru that made touchscreen phones works wasn’t an app ecosystem. That came after people were already crazy about iPhones. It was capacitive touch screens. Basically everything before was resistive touch, which is why they usually had styluses. Getting touch, and really multi-touch, working well was the game changer that redefined cell phones.
From Google's official Pixel 9 Pro Fold handling instructions: (https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/15090466?hl=en#...)
> Flexible screens are softer than traditional phone screens, so avoid contact with sand, crumbs, *fingernails* and sharp objects.
I'm sure that if Apple invented the exact same thing in the exact same way, it would have been the "greatest thing since sliced bread".
The tech isn't there yet.
For those that are not chronically online, a mobile phone from a decade ago has everything they need. If you only have to phone the family, WhatsApp your neighbours, get the map out, use a search engine and do your online banking, then a flagship phone is a bit over the top. If anything, the old phone is preferable since its loss would not be the end of the world.
I have seen a few elderly neighbours rocking Samsung Galaxy S7s with no need to upgrade. Although the S7 isn't quite a decade old, the apps that are actually used (WhatsApp, online banking) will be working with the S7 for many years to come since there is this demographic of active users.
Now, what if we could get these people to upgrade every three years with a feature that the 'elderly neighbour' would want? Eyesight isn't what it used to be in old age, so how about a nice big screen?
You can't deliberately hobble the phone with poor battery life or programme it to go slow in an update because we know that isn't going to win the customer over, but a screen that gets tatty after three years? Sounds good to me.
I have several apps that no longer work on my otherwise good phone bought in 2018 because I can no longer update the OS that they require.
Edit: This is a honest question.
Whatsapp also no longer works on it, thus the phone is useless.
Which is sad, as it has a great camera, battery life and is very light.
It's small, has dual sim card sockets, and a headphone jack.
I'm not sure how I'd replace it to be honest.
Because there are very cheap, lightweight adaptors to headphone jack from USB-C.
Wireless chargers are pretty good but it’s still a pain to wear out your port.
I can dual-SIM my iphone by using one e-Sim and one physical. The only thing it is not, is small...
The S7 you mention lasted 4 years, and received the last patch in 2020.
Not convinced that doing online banking on a phone that hasn't had software updates for 5 years is a good idea.
A lot of us the techies can be strong-armed via FOMO and other tropes but good luck convincing the elderly neighbors.