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Comment by tfinniga | Hacker News Reader

So, here's something I've been wondering about smart watches, maybe someone here can answer.

It seems like the big dealbreaker for these is battery life. But a cheap watch with quartz timekeeping and digital lcd display can last a year or more on a single small battery.

Would it be possible to sandwich two lcd displays into the face of the watch, one that is cheap and one that is high-res full-color? Always display the time in the common janky digits, and then when touched, hand off to the nice display? You could even get them to quickly crossfade as the backlight turns on.

That way your $300 watch is at least as good as a $10 watch. Would that be possible?

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It also depends what features do you expect from the watch. I have a Pebble. It does everything I want on a "smart" watch, and the battery lasts from 7 to 10 days. Which is obviously worst than a year, but it's good enough that it doesn't become a PITA for me.

I don't have one but I remember with my last smartphone (years ago), the battery lasted at least 3 days and I was able to make it last more than a week without any issue. I found out that if I didn't charge it everyday, I would often forget to do it. I had a cable to charge it at work because I forgot too often at first. I started charging it everyday and when I bought the Galaxy Nexus, I had no issue with the awful battery life. I would still like if it lasted more than 2 days, just in case.

If the reviews on the Moto 360 aren't too bad and the battery last at least 2 days, I will probably buy it.

I don't think that the display is the biggest energy draw here. It will be the CPU which is drawing most power compared to the quartz crystal in a simple $10 LCD watch.

In which case, could you hibernate the CPU as well as the screen, but still leave the time on display?

but then you are defeating the purpose of wearing a smartwatch, which I believe is to keep receiving notifications for calls, emails, messages and so on. If you only wake up the CPU every minute to check then it's far too slow to be useful.

Forgive me for being a bit out of touch.

Is the idea of a smartwatch to be your main phone, small enough to strap to your wrist? I imagined that it was more like a really good watch - primarily there to tell the time, but allowing you to use it as a phone when that would otherwise be inconvenient.

I played around with a prototype of an Android watch, and it just seemed too small to be useful. It seems like a remote control to a smartphone would be more useful - something that vibrated when I get a notification, and could send commands to Siri.

It is a remote control to your smartphone - the current Wear crop don't handle any of the phones' tasks, and it vibrates when I get a notification or phonecall...

So, for example, I could tell my phone to notify the watch when I receive a call or text message from my wife? Then when she calls, the watch vibrates.

Would that be expensive from a power consumption perspective? I know next to nothing about hardware, so perhaps I'm being naive.

Well, at the minute, it vibrates when anyone calls or texts, all Wear is is a little screen showing Android's notification system and replicating the alert structure on your device already (e.g. when I get an email, it sits in the notification bar on my phone, but I chose not to vibrate, and on Wear is opens a notification, but doesn't vibrate. Whereas for a text it vibrates on my phone, and so it vibrates the watch as well. Doesn't have sounds, so the watch doesn't ring). It does cost battery life, hence the discussion surrounding it elsewhere in the post.

But then you wouldn't get a daily awesome watch face. Nor cards without waking it up. As it is, cards will appear even on dimmed screens.

I agree that battery life is the killer feature that all these watches are missing. I can also see that Google, Samsung, LG, and Motorola are trying to hype the watches like there's no tomorrow.

I really think that the center of the universe for all these devices is the phone and that the watch is really a phone accessory.

Are these watches water resistant/proof?

Most of them are in completely sealed cases with no openings at all (they charge via induction). They're at the very least rainproof and likely would survive for a while under shallow water (depends on pressure, etc).

Smartphones suffer because of the holes (e.g. headphone jack, micro-USB port, button border, etc).

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