Smartwatches? Its about time...

The wristwatch is dead.

Only tell the time? Pah! All hail the Smartwatch!

Once upon a time (sorry) we had wind-up watches with hands, which told you the time and maybe the date, as long as you didn’t mind spending half a morning winding it on by 24 hours when there were only 30 days in the month. Februarys resulted in owners turning up at Casualty with blistered fingers and wrist sprains.

Then, some enterprising folks noticed that liquid crystal displays, when linked up to computer bits, a teensy battery, and a lot of cheap plastic, could also tell the time, in a particularly-hard-to-read-in-the-dark kind of way, as pressing the button for the light usually meant you could see the hour, but not the minutes.

These had the ability to act as an alarm clock, playing tinny electronic renditions of classical tunes, chime annoyingly on the hour, and be suitably wrong that every school classroom circa 1981 sounded like it had been invaded by crickets for about 5 minutes either side of the top of the hour.

They could be stopwatches too, boasting a Lap function, meaning each and every one of us could finally own technology we had precisely no use for, unless you were James Hunt. And to be honest, the likelihood of crashing an F1 car whilst trying to figure out which button to press probably meant The Shunt didn’t bother either.

But times change. The Smartwatch has arrived, only about 20 years after most of us assumed it would, bursting with technology that enables a small screen to look like an analogue watch. It can be a mobile phone too, which is handy if you happen to be the last remaining person on the planet who hasn’t already got one.

They can run all sorts of nifty Apps, telling you exactly what the weather is doing where you are (handy if you happen to be inside a windowless building and need to decide what to wear before going outside), even Twitter, meaning even a 140 character tweet is too big to read in one go.

Samsung’s Galaxy Gear looks just like I’d imagined watches would in the future when I was but a small, grumpy, child, but it costs a bomb, and only works in conjunction with their even more incendiary-priced phone. The market will soon be flooded with other watches of varying cleverness and cost, and you can even get a Driver Smartwatch for your Nissan. Assumingly, like all passengers, it immediately goes to sleep on a long journey, snores, then wakes up just before you arrive, saying “That didn’t take long, did it?”

Rewind to the early 80s, and you could buy a Casio calculator watch, with buttons so small even a pin made adding up a numeric lottery, whilst you pretended to be Captain Kirk in front of your mates. Some things don’t change, it seems.

Beam me up, Scotty. I just need to know if it’s time to go home yet.

This post first appeared in my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column in the North West Evening Mail on the 13th of September 2013. It seems to have made it into the paper completely unedited, and with my title used, which is something of a rarity. If you'd like to see it on the paper's website, you can find it here

Currently, there's a particularly fine instance of serendipitous photo alignment there, as my profile picture appears alongside that of one of TV's "Hairy Bikers", which make us look like some kind of 'Before And After' photoshoot about the benefits of having a haircut and a shave.

Bearing in mind my set word count, this column was already 60 words over before I'd even finished writing it, meaning I dropped a whole intended section on Google Glass, and then had to spend a while editing what I'd already typed. It's funny how columns you think are going to be a struggle to get enough words for turn out sometimes to be the easiest ones to write.

(The alphabetic musical odyssey is nearly done. I'm now into the final run of ZZ Top. Mind you, then there's a couple of hundred compilation CDs still to go...)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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