Smart watches and glasses
I'm finding it a bit hard to read all of this speculation and talk of crazy new devices. Not because they are crazy innovative, but more because they are simply bat-shit crazy.
We'll start with the obvious topic; Google Glass. At $1500 it is quite simply insane. And it costs $1500 for all of the wrong reasons. They tried to shove way too much tech in there. It should be reduced to basically a HUD for a part of an operating system running ideally on, say, your smartphone. Instead it has a camera, sensors and all sorts of crazy ass shit which basically guarantee no one is going to develop for it. Even most Android fanatics are not going to design apps for Glass. There is no market. The device is too costly, and more or less unavailable and the application of software to the usage of these cameras and sensors is proprietary. Even if the API's are useable on a phone, you wouldn't write software with the same UI and capabilities for a pair of glasses as you would for a phone or tablet.
So, I hate to say it... but Google Glass is a stupid idea. That doesn't mean it won't take off... but I doubt it. What would make Glass work? Create multiple tiers of the product. The base product should be just a "dumb" HUD driven by a nearby Android smartphone. Addition of things like cameras and other sensors should be only on higher end models and should integrate seamlessly into the Android OS so that the phone or tablet can leverage these sensors as first class citizens in the OS. And while I doubt it will happen coming from Google, it would be truly awesome and likely catapult the product to success if the communication were done through a public available standard (double bonus points for open API).
Smart watches? Even worse. I'm really not sure why everyone seems to be running in this direction now. Samsung has a smart watch and Google and Apple are rumoured to be working on some. But what, of true value, can one do on a smart watch? And at what price? My watch doesn't need a touch screen. With the size of cell phone screens growing to sizes where the word "phablet" is allowed to exist, apparently even cell phone screens aren't large enough for what we want to do on cell phones. How f***ing huge will my watch need to be before I can do anything that isn't simply annoyingly trivial?
Don't get me wrong. Done right I think there is a market for smart watches. But as with smart glasses, I think the right way to go is as more or less a dumb terminal will very little actual functionality driven by a smartphone. I simply don't think people can afford or will tolerate $1000+ prices because Google crammed an un-necessarily powerful processor and battery into a device when their $700 phones have yet more processing and battery power and could easily handle much of the work the glasses deal with.
And my final target... whatever the hell they end up naming Googles rumoured gaming console. People think it will be a success because initial sales of Ouyas sold out. People! Initial sales of the BlackBerry Z10 sold out. Initial Sales of Lumia 900's sold out in many places. I'll a number of places even saw Wii-U's selling out. Put simply... initial sales are useless as a data point. Especially appending the word sold out. While this is indeed good news for Ouya... it means little. Firstly, I don't think there is a sizeable market for this type of a product. Most people play dinky games on their phone because they already own a phone. Similarly, most people started playing Facebook games because they already had a Facebook account and were already on the site for hours a day. Very few people got a Facebook account to play Facebook games. I think the same will be true of the Ouya. Yes, there will be some people who are different. And this more than likely accounts for the sell outs. Frankly, perhaps there are numbers out there, but the articles I read only said they sold out, not how many units they sold. If it isn't well into the millions it isn't that impressive. If it is only in the 10's or even the hundreds of thousands, those are numbers easily met by a cult following in todays age of 7 Billion+ people on the Earth.
We'll start with the obvious topic; Google Glass. At $1500 it is quite simply insane. And it costs $1500 for all of the wrong reasons. They tried to shove way too much tech in there. It should be reduced to basically a HUD for a part of an operating system running ideally on, say, your smartphone. Instead it has a camera, sensors and all sorts of crazy ass shit which basically guarantee no one is going to develop for it. Even most Android fanatics are not going to design apps for Glass. There is no market. The device is too costly, and more or less unavailable and the application of software to the usage of these cameras and sensors is proprietary. Even if the API's are useable on a phone, you wouldn't write software with the same UI and capabilities for a pair of glasses as you would for a phone or tablet.
So, I hate to say it... but Google Glass is a stupid idea. That doesn't mean it won't take off... but I doubt it. What would make Glass work? Create multiple tiers of the product. The base product should be just a "dumb" HUD driven by a nearby Android smartphone. Addition of things like cameras and other sensors should be only on higher end models and should integrate seamlessly into the Android OS so that the phone or tablet can leverage these sensors as first class citizens in the OS. And while I doubt it will happen coming from Google, it would be truly awesome and likely catapult the product to success if the communication were done through a public available standard (double bonus points for open API).
Smart watches? Even worse. I'm really not sure why everyone seems to be running in this direction now. Samsung has a smart watch and Google and Apple are rumoured to be working on some. But what, of true value, can one do on a smart watch? And at what price? My watch doesn't need a touch screen. With the size of cell phone screens growing to sizes where the word "phablet" is allowed to exist, apparently even cell phone screens aren't large enough for what we want to do on cell phones. How f***ing huge will my watch need to be before I can do anything that isn't simply annoyingly trivial?
Don't get me wrong. Done right I think there is a market for smart watches. But as with smart glasses, I think the right way to go is as more or less a dumb terminal will very little actual functionality driven by a smartphone. I simply don't think people can afford or will tolerate $1000+ prices because Google crammed an un-necessarily powerful processor and battery into a device when their $700 phones have yet more processing and battery power and could easily handle much of the work the glasses deal with.
And my final target... whatever the hell they end up naming Googles rumoured gaming console. People think it will be a success because initial sales of Ouyas sold out. People! Initial sales of the BlackBerry Z10 sold out. Initial Sales of Lumia 900's sold out in many places. I'll a number of places even saw Wii-U's selling out. Put simply... initial sales are useless as a data point. Especially appending the word sold out. While this is indeed good news for Ouya... it means little. Firstly, I don't think there is a sizeable market for this type of a product. Most people play dinky games on their phone because they already own a phone. Similarly, most people started playing Facebook games because they already had a Facebook account and were already on the site for hours a day. Very few people got a Facebook account to play Facebook games. I think the same will be true of the Ouya. Yes, there will be some people who are different. And this more than likely accounts for the sell outs. Frankly, perhaps there are numbers out there, but the articles I read only said they sold out, not how many units they sold. If it isn't well into the millions it isn't that impressive. If it is only in the 10's or even the hundreds of thousands, those are numbers easily met by a cult following in todays age of 7 Billion+ people on the Earth.
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