The Allure of Shiny Tech

Every year I do the AP national reading, I set aside part of that check for something special.  This year, the vast majority of it has been earmarked for the various portions of my National Boards, but as always, I have decided to keep just a little back to spend on something nonessential.

I have a FitBit, and I love it.  I wear it almost all the time, and it really has helped me increase my activity.  (Well, except right now in the summer when it's hotter than nine hells outside and World Cup is on all the time...)  The only thing I wish is that the FitBit had a watch on it.  If I'm going to have something on my my wrist, I wish it could at least tell me what time it is.  There are many situations where I simply cannot pull out my phone, and I do not want to wear a regular watch, so having the time on this slender band would be great.

Recently, a whole new batch of smartwatches has been released by several companies.  I looked at the ones from Samsung, and I liked what I was seeing.  They have gone past the Pebble phase of something functional but quite ugly and are actually becoming interesting.

I was most interested in the Samsung Gear Fit, a combination of fitness band and smartwatch.  When compared to the other things that are available, the design is lovely.  It is designed to do all the things I want one to do, measure my steps, run my music player, show me notifications, tell me the time.  However, when I started doing research on it, the reviews were almost universally lukewarm.  Everyone loves the design but hates the functionality.

I could have dismissed some of the reviews.  Those people expected it to summon a space pegacorn to sweep them to a solid gold house, apparently.  Some of them had such piddly little faults or expected such massive things no simple smartwatch is probably going to be capable of for a long while that I took them with the required grain of salt and moved on.  I probably would have already ordered one except for the repeated claim that it does not measure steps accurately.  One reviewer claimed he'd been sitting in his chair, swung his arm to reach for something, and the Gear Fit registered 36 steps.

Yeah.

That's a problem.

Again, one or two such instances would have been possible to discount.  The fact that almost every single reviewer on every site I checked said much the same means I just can't justify spending the money on a device that isn't what is should be.

There's another option coming later this summer, apparently.  Motorola is going to join the fray, and from the
very vague ads they have, I am optimistic that this could be the thing I need.  For one thing, it looks gorgeous.  It's not a conspicuous square with a technofabulous band that screams, "HEY!  LOOK AT ME!  SMARTWAAAATCH!!!"  Instead, its face is round, its band interchangeable, and with the right clock face selected, it wouldn't draw that much more attention than the old-fashioned analog watches I wore for years and years.

What they say it will do, however, would make my life so much easier.  It has deep Google integration, and just the little teaser previews available here and there promise fitness measuring and everything else I want.  Granted, this one probably doesn't have a "summon pegacorn" setting, either, but that is totally fine by me.  My wants and needs are simple.  (heh)

So I'm still waiting.  I'm sure that as we get closer to the season of commercial feeding frenzy (aka Black Friday/Cyber Monday), more of these devices will appear.  I'm not going to jump on the beta device wagon this time.  I want something that I can use for a long time, and I will wait until it appears.