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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

The Gear does not feel like a complete gimmick - not having to take out your (big screen) SmartPhone out for emails/texts/pics/shares etc. is kinda useful to the mainstream people.

But the problems are Price, Performance(Battery life, responsivness) and Limitations that make it work only with Samsung phones. For those reasons I think the Gen 1 of the Gear will flop. And who knows what kind of apps Samsung is running on the Gear - if that's something non-standard it makes it even worse. (If Google released a watch it would hopefully work with all Android devices and let people build apps using the standard Android SDK.)

So meh on the Gear. With Note 3 and Note 10.1 however Samsung seems to be mostly doing the right things - extended multitasking, more RAM, Dot, Circle, Box, great screen res, more battery life etc. Almost makes me hopeful 10 in Android tablets might go somewhere finally!

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Keep in mind that not only is it limited to Samsung devices, but it doesn't even support their entire range of currently-sold devices. No launch support for the Galaxy S4, their flagship device and the one that they sell the most. No promised support for their brand-new Galaxy Mega 6.3. No support for any of their other devices that are still on the shelf being sold even today...

Yeah, probably something to do with BT 4.0 LE - only Android 4.3 supports it - so all those other devices will have to painfully wait for their respective carriers to release the 4.3 update. As good as not gonna happen!

Samsung pushing them hard to release 4.3 might let us see some progress.

I wonder if Google has an even greater (more so than with phones and tablets) inherent disadvantage to Apple because it's going to be beholden to a more generic UI given the diversity of devices by the android OEMs.

The Google card UI is slick and very user friendly, but it can stagnate pretty quickly given the potential for a more accommodating, dynamic UI that a company like Apple can make with a limited range of devices. I think it's not just a simple visual gimmick that Apple demonstrated a parallax effect as a major visual feature of iOS 7.0. If the iWatch is some sort of wrap-around your wrist screen, then layers of visual information could be really interesting.

Well Apple had their chance with iPod Nano Touch - it doesn't look any different than iOS. Besides the key on these tiny displays is going to be how minimalistic you can get - get the UI baggage out of the way and present as much info as possible.

Imagine looking down on your wrist and it immediately lights up and shows you the time and date and some notification that you have messages. Rotate your wrist clockwise and you can see some more details about the message (the subject, who it's from, etc.) and you can decide whether you want to take out your phone or tablet and address it.

Rotate your wrist counter-clockwise and you see slowly start to see more relevant information (weather, news headlines, etc.). It would be kind of like google now, except not necessarily requiring interaction and it would be much more visually interesting.

or simply a circular motion with the tip of your finger could work too?

Great joke..The scroll wheel worked before touch was great, and touch works before simple, naturalistic motions can be perfected.

Presumably it would have a built in gyro you you could tip it left/right and up/down so scroll through screens, go into menus etc. It might go a bit crazy when you are running down the road though :-p

Hence the eye contact.

> The Gear does not feel like a complete gimmick

I like the design. I could see myself wearing one while actively engaged in various sports. I'm not so connected to my Note 2 while playing basketball, but I just might be with Gear.

You'll have to wait for the Note 2 to get Android 4.3 for that I think. Qualcomm seems to be coming out with something similar at the same price point and it seems to work with any Android 4.0.3+ phone - http://www.androidcentral.com/qualcomm-announces-toq-smart-w...

Except the watch is pretty much worthless without the phone it's attached to. Perhaps it would work from gym bag on the bench, definitely not from the locker room.

Or perhaps you could just play basketball.

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