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I have a Smartwatch, and I’m not sure why

Smartwatches. They’re the new cool toy for geeks. Having a small mainframe on your wrist sounds pretty nifty. But has the time come for everyone to strap a mini-cray to an appendage? I’m honestly not sure.

I’d been resisting jumping onto the smartwatch bandwagon for a long time. When Pebble proved that there was a demand for the gadgets, I watched with interest, but the device didn’t seem polished enough to be worth the expense. So I waited.

Then the Apple Watch came along, and I was still underwhelmed. Super expensive, and because I no longer used an iPhone, not really helpful to me.

Then Android Wear happened, and I began to take an interest.

The first generation of smartwatches was pretty limited. Low battery life, poor performance, clunky look. I wasn’t feeling the buzz, but I could see there was potential there. Then Android Wear 2.0 was announced, and I realized my time was near.

The amount of time I was spending looking at my phone was reaching criticality. I needed a way to be able to be notified about meetings and messages, without having to haul out the damned black slab everytime. And, lets be honest, I like knowing what time it is. So yes, one of the reasons I wanted a smartwatch was I wanted to use it… as a watch.

My employer has a great perk in that you get an allowance each year to spend on health related items. A gym membership, a yoga class, or… a smartwatch, for helping track activities. Given this final nudge, I decided it was time.

Now the next step is to choose which one. I knew I wanted Android Wear 2.0 compatible devices, and also wanted something that didn’t look completely dorky. I have an advantage in that I have big hands, so most of the watches would look just fine next to my meaty paws.

I settled on the Fossil Q Founder Gen 2. I liked the looks, the price was reasonable, and it was Android Wear 2.0 compatable. The styling was quasi-retro, in that it had a light brown leather strap, stainless steel case, and classic lines. Amazon click, and it was on its way.

First impressions

I like it. I find it attractive, comfortable, and useful. It is a very good watch. I love that I can customize the watch display to show me other small tidbits of information. Temperature, how many messages I have waiting, how many steps I’ve taken today, battery level, etc. They are all available at a glance, with the display going into a simpler mode when the watch face is not turned toward me, thus saving battery life.

I’ve always been a sucker for geeky watches. I totally had a Casio Databank when I was a kid, and later moved up to good backpacking / hiking watches for backcountry stuff, but this is in a league of it’s own. This is a machine with 4gig of storage, a gig of RAM, and a 64bit 2.1ghz CPU with 3d graphics capability. Those are specs you’d see on a desktop machine from a couple years ago, all on a computer that lives on your wrist.

So, how’s it work?

Eh

I have to say, it’s… okay. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an excellent watch. It tells time, shows me some basic information that I need to have quick access to, but… I’m not blown away by it’s utility. I find the act of staring at it, manipulating menus or scrolling through options, or using a swype-like interface to write a text message tedious and awkward. If I’m going to do any of that, I might as well pull out my phone, which I have to have with me at all times anyway, because the watch basically functions as an extension of the phone. At this, it excels. If I find a function doesn’t work or is unavailable on the watch, I can whip out the phone and get things done.

So where does this leave us on the plusses or minuses of a smartwatch? Unfortunately, it’s still in a gray area. As a geeky watch, I think they’re cool and nice looking and work. As a logical extension of the phone in a new and useful way, I think there’s a long way to go.

Know what’s no fun? Smartphone failure while travelling.

Last week I was in California for a big tech summit my employer throws every 2 years. It’s a pretty big deal, with 3 days of presentations, workshops, tech demos, and interesting keynotes. I had a great time, met many of my coworkers I only know through voices on conference calls, and generally learned a ton.

Thursday night I was in the San Francisco offices, getting ready to head to the airport. I had 4 hours until my flight was scheduled to leave, and while in a meeting, I noticed my Moto X Pure (aka ‘Style’) phone reboots itself. “Okay, no worries, probably an update in progress. NBD.”

I went back to my meeting, and glanced at the phone again 10 minutes later. Looked like it was rebooting again. “Hmmm…. shouldn’t do that, but… okay…”

Half an hour later and continuous reboots, I was beginning to get worried. The pattern was the same. Boot, Optimizing apps, starting apps, reboot. Something was definitely wrong.

A little googling found me an article that describes the Moto X doing this sometimes when either an app gets corrupted, or there’s problems in the cache. Using instructions on the net I reset the cache from the bootloader, and let it try to boot again.

Nope, stuck in the loop again.

I was beginning to get very concerned. Traveling without a working phone, to echo a great movie… “Possible… but not recommended!”

In the end, I had to pull the ripcord, and do a full factory reset. Time until getting on the plane? 3 hours, with a half hour drive to the airport. This is the first time I’ve had to wipe and reload my phone from scratch as far as I can remember (we’re going back to Treo days here), at least where that sort of reload didn’t also involve replacing the phone completely.

In the end, it worked. The unit was able to do a factory reset, came up, did a few updates, and was back online with my normal account. It didn’t automatically reinstall all the apps (which I found a bit odd), so I had to manually tell Play to re-install the critical pieces I needed (including the authentication tool I use for work).

I was able to be on the road and mostly operational inside an hour, and made my flight just fine. I’ll credit my rabid use of 1Password for helping me get all my accounts re-connected.

Naturally, there’s still a few things that are out of whack. I spent a year twiddling that install to make the menus line up nicely, or set my backgrounds just so, etc, so post-reload, it sort of feels like a new phone, but really isn’t.

Now I’m on another trip, this time to Utah, and my phone is happily keeping me company. Alas, I’m finding all the little bits I haven’t reinstalled, such as all my local cached music in Spotify – something that would have been helpful on this flight But, that’s something to set up once I’m back in the hotel.

Wherein Dave learns that Podcasts are Kinda Awesome

Face it, I’ve been on the net a long time. Usually by the time some buzzword I’ve heard gets enough attention that I check into it, it turns out the hype doesn’t even remotely match the reality. And thus it’s been for me with Podcasts. You can’t swing a dead cat without hearing someone say “And subscribe to our podcast!!!”

Maybe it’s just my early trauma dealing with downloaded files / iTunes syncing problems / PalmPilot lack of audio, whatever, but I never listened to podcasts, even when a friend would say “Hey, did you hear that podcast by Bubbitah Bingah? Dude was awesome.” “Uh huh, what’s the link to the text of the article again?”

Well, even old dogs can learn new tricks. I’m into the third year of dealing with a 40 minute commute, all along highways, with nothing but XM radio or NPR to listen to, I decided to finally take the plunge and check out podcasts. Herein lies what I’ve learned.

Get a good a podcast app

First things first. You need a way to listen to podcasts. For me the important mechanism would be something that allows for downloads ahead of time (say, over Wifi), and then I could catch up as the week went along. I’m fully wedded to Android now, happily using my Motorola Moto X for gaming, music, mail, calendaring – heck, everything. So a decent Android app was needed. I settled on Podcast Addict. It’s a great app that categorizes all my subscriptions, and lets me download all or some of the episodes ahead of time.

Now all I needed was content

So, what do you want to listen to?

There’s seriously no shortage of podcasts out there. And, frankly, most of them suck. When you have no need to limit your time to a 10 minute slot on a radio show, and can blather on for an hour and a half about navel lint, the field gets crowded pretty quickly.

I recommend starting with things you know – being an NPR addict, these were easy:

RadioLab
Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me
Marketplace
CarTalk
This American Life

But after that, we start getting into things that are related, but you don’t get to hear quite as often.

The Moth
Ted Radio Hour

And then we get into fun stuff. Up until this point, all of that stuff I’d hear on the radio from time to time (either on NPR or on Public Radio Remix – a station I highly recommend, btw). But what about independent stuff? This is what I came to share with you.

First, I have to highly highly recommend Our Fake History. This podcast focuses on deep dives into historical myths, legends, and stories, and digs out what parts of those stories are true and what has been embellished over time. I got completely sucked into their first ‘big’ series, “Was There Really a Trojan War”. I learned more about the Iliad, Greek mythology, and 19th century archeology than I had ever known before. The current series is going into Helen of Troy, and it’s equally fascinating. Highly recommended!

Following along after is Lore. In a similar vein, this podcast talks about history with a sort of dark bent. Vampires, missing persons – where did all these stories come from? It has a darker, more ‘sitting around the fireplace telling stories’ feel, but all of it is well researched and detailed.

Moving off the dark history bit, I also listen to the Petapixel podcast. This series follows the website pretty closely, but has extra commentary and thoughts by Mike “Sharky” James. Great stuff.

One last shout out. My friend Tim pointed me to Welcome to Night Vale. This is the fictional broadcast of a public service radio station in the town of Night Vale. Think of it as a sort of Prairie Home Companion meets HP Lovecraft. It has it’s ups and downs, but has some great moments in it.

So, if you’ve ever thought about fiddling around with podcasts, I recommend getting Podcast Addict (it’s free), anv giving these podcasts a try. There’s lots to be learned.

Vainglory

I’ve been on the lookout for a new game to put my new Moto X Pure Android through, a device that’s extremely high powered and seems perfect for games. Ever since I saw the tablet revolution taking over gaming, I’ve been hoping for a decent, realtime, immersive game that I could get behind. (Why WoW and Eve aren’t on tablets yet is beyond me).

My son Zach was a huge booster of MOBA games before they were cool. DOTA2, and later League of Legends were daily activities. I tried them off and on, but found the complexities and knowledge curve too much for casual gaming.

Enter Vainglory.

Many companies have claimed to make the MOBA experience enjoyable on a mobile device, but this is the first one that’s gotten me completely hooked. I’m still in casual play mode, but I’m finding it intensely enjoyable. The graphics are magnificent, the characters interesting and varied, and the gameplay is perfect. It’s a dead-on implementation of the MOBA ideals (and yes, it has last hits :).

I’ve put in a couple hours so far, getting a feel for 3 of the heroes. There’s so much more to learn – if you watch the videos on the Vainglory channel on Youtube, watch the detailed rundowns of how to play each hero. The technicalities are vast and deep, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever get to that point with more than 1-2 favorites, but I’m ecstatic that the company behind the game (awesomely named ‘SUPER EVIL MEGACORP‘), spared no expense in making the game easy to get into, but also having huge depth to it.

Anyone want to team?