cobaltage

I don’t know. It’s never okay to connect headphones to a watch, IMO.

The Pebble is the calculator-watch of today.

I’ve been thinking about going in on this, even though I love my old fashioned watch, and I’ve never wanted a smartwatch in the past. And there are two primary reasons: I rely on my smartphone more than I have in the past, and this is finally a smartwatch that can be seen in ordinary daylight and that doesn’t need to be charged every single day.

IMO, the $100 price is exactly the reason why this Kickstarter has done so well. There are many people who would have expected something like this to go for maybe $200-$250. I have no doubt that there are some people who would in fact pay up to $400 for it. Because the actual price is significantly less than what people expect, and much, much less than some people would pay, it generates a huge amount of interest. This is exactly what happened with the iPad — everyone was expecting it to be about $900, and it came in at $500. If you can defy expectations and perceived value with a lower price, you immediately lower the threshold for people to decide to buy your product.

Bluetooth doesn’t just allow you to connect to one device at a time. E.g., mouse and keyboard.

I think there are two main categories of interested parties: 1) Runners, bikers, maybe skiers, etc. The Pebble promises to deliver all of the information processing and data from your smartphone — GPS, time, distance/pace, music control, text messages — in such a way that you can monitor it on your watch. 2) People who, in the past, would have been sporting a digital watch that maybe had a calculator or PDA functions (or maybe even Space Invaders), and who maybe want an iPod Nano watch, but have been frustrated with previous smartwatch concepts because of battery life. (There are of course people who fall into both categories.)

I’m not sure why the Soundmatters Foxl isn’t better known. It was released well before the Jambox came out, and every side-by-side comparison between the two that I’ve found has the Foxl coming out on top. I haven’t been able to compare these units myself, but the Foxl is excellent.

MS has really evolved in their UI design with their non-PC products: XBox 360, Zune Marketplace, and now Metro. And OSX and Windows remain more similar than dissimilar. Steve Jobs was basically correct, though. There is really nothing about the evolution of Windows or Office that screams “we spent money on user interface research”.

This Metro thing is something new for MS. But I never have counted MS out. Look at how long it took MS to break into console gaming, but also at the fact that the XBox 360 is still the currently available model. It was smart for MS to back out last year and to pour resources into Windows 8. IMO, Windows Phone will quickly eat into Android’s marketshare and compete with Apple for the enterprise market. (RIM is no longer in this proposed scenario., of course.)