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'Good Morning America' Goes Inside Apple's Secret Apple Watch Fitness Testing Lab
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As and avid swimmer and surfer, I wish theWatch was waterproof. That would be fantastic to track these activities. I guess gotta wait for future versions will address this issue.
Next year someone has to buy that 5ATM 18 karat edition watch. Don't you think?
I forgot about DC Rainmaker. I can't wait for his review of the Watchthat'll be the definitive review.
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Prior to the Fitbit One (the third gen, I believe), the Fitbit did have to sync directly with a computer. That was the only reason I upgraded to the One.
I refused to switch to the first-gen iPhone because my Treo 800 had way more features: thousands of apps, copy/paste, threaded MMS, 3G, a microSD slot, a native ToDo list, etc. A ton of Windows Mobile phones and the BB Curve had similar functionality.
I've been using smartphones since 2001, starting with the Treo 300, and trust me, there was a large contingent of early adopters like me who dismissed the idea that the iPhone brought anything new to the table except for the slate form factor. Obviously, we were wrong, but not because pre-iPhone smartphones were less capable.
Well, and how many people did it convince at launch? It took the first iPhone 74 days to sell the first million. Look at how low its sales were in the first year before the app store was opened. I am pretty sure you would call the Apple Watch a failure if it sells as low as the iPhone did in its first year.
But my argument stands completely independent of the iPhone (Apple expects the Apple Watch to provide the user with much more utility than that of a fitness tracker and expects the combined utility of it to be the major driver in sales numbers). But as you said, let's best focus on that argument and not go down the rabbit hole of comparing everything with the iPhone.
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And I thought the FitBit One was one of their first devices.
As I said earlier - the first iPhone (at launch) was a lot of fun to PLAY with. To tap, zoom, pinch, etc. It had a cool factor with the UI. But for actual functionality, like you also said, it was pretty limited. Clearly they have come quite far from those early days
Sure, but the Apple Watch is so much more than a fitness tracker. So, these employee knew that Apple was releasing a fitness tracker. Going by what they knew about fitness trackers at the time, their starting point for how the device looks like and what features it had would have been something like the Suunto Ambit:
Meaning they still didn't know squat as to what the Apple Watch is or looks like.
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Nothing the general population cared to use. The same way the general population doesn't care about sportwatches, of which a lot quite good ones with a lot of functionality existed prior to 2015. I own a sportswatch (actually four by now) but they don't offer enough functionality that I would wear them 100% of the time. I wear them when I do sports, I also wear them part of the time when I am not doing sports but part of that time I also wear two other 'normal' watches.
Debatable. Also irrelevant. The discussion wasn't about the audience for the device(s) - but rather capabilities.
Doesn't it just? That female presenter is nauseating, the editing is so harsh and the content is non-existent.
American TV is just so awful.
Sprinting isn't really good for devellopping muscles either. Sprinters get that way through well, weights, not sprinting
Obviously you won't get big muscles but you will develope some and you won't be losing the ones you already have by sprinting. If you want to gain big muscles you need to do weights and plyometrics.
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Good Morning America... Or was that some sort of joke?
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The sales were low because the iPhone was selling for $600. How could anyone not see the iPhone as a revolution? Sure, the Treo was able to do more things but it didn't have multi touch! I don't understand how people just didn't get it at the time of the iPhone introduction. The first time I saw Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone I knew instantly that it was going to revolutionize everything from phones to pcs, just thinking at the idea of being able to control something with your fingers was mind blowing.
Lots of people got it - but utility is everything. If you need certain functionality - no matter how cool another phone is - you're not going to buy it. And at the time, $600 was a big investment in a phone - even as "cool" as it was.
It's not a question of people getting it or not. How many people do you think buy a phone on the premise that "one day" it might be able to do what you need it to do now vs what one can do now for them?
I don't know many. I do know many early adopters (like myself) that bought the original iPhone because it was definitely fun/cool and we wanted to see what would become of the device. But it didn't replace my work smartphone for a few years.
Many examples. By 2007, many/most smartphones of the time had 3G, MMS, GPS, a video camera (some with another front-facing), and of course could run third party apps available from several online stores... all abilities which the first iPhone was missing.
(I once met someone who believed that the iPhone was the first device to be able to run Google Maps, Tom Tom navigation, Opera browser, first aid apps, etc. Nope, not by a long shot.)
The biggest problem was that the screens weren't very big yet, but that was changing.
For example, when the first iPhone went on sale in mid 2007, the Toshiba G900 also came out. It had a WVGA (800x480) retina (312ppi) screen three years before the iPhone 4 came out with retina. It also had a fingerprint reader which could not only be used to unlock the phone, but could also be used to instant-launch a different app per finger, and then be used for scrolling.
Btw, in 2006, analysts were predicting that 2007 would be the year that capacitive touchcreens and finger friendly UIs would take off.
For example, in 2006, Qualcomm was making a capacitive touch controller and working with several phone makers. Everyone inside the business knew the change was coming.
That's why Apple felt the need to include one in their first phone, along with a touch friendly UI. The change was already on the way, but the older manufacturers had to step carefully. Apple, on the other hand, safe without years of legacy customer to support, was able to leap in ahead of everyone else.
The Fitbit One was preceded by the Fitbit and the Fitbit Ultra (which added an altimeter and motivational messages).
That's the thing, the iPhone wasn't meant to replace your work smartphone, it was the first smartphone for the casual consumer, the first smartphone for the average joe. I think that's wath most people didn't get, even Steve Ballmer didn't get it.
This is a change I do not like. We are no longer considered "users" (person with some competence), but just "consumers" (stupid "average Joe"). This probably explains the resistance against Apple by many long time users.
I wonder how Apple will bring this concept to exercise. I have finished my first marathon in 4:03 last year. I am going to try to break 4h next month. Won't be easy, I have to fight for that. Apple can't make life easier this time. If you are faster than me, congratulations. But you cannot simply buy that on iTunes.
Christian
But the capabilities were discussed to show whether there is a market for the Apple Watch.
So, the first two out of eight FitBit devices (FitBit, FitBit Ultra, Fitbit One, Zip, Flex, Force, Charge, Surge) did need to sync via a computer. That makes bbeagle's statement still largely incorrect, in particular from today's point of view given that all current products support synching directly with a smartphone.
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This only shows that the overall utility, usability and desirability relies on much more than specs. For example, having a fingerprint reader that exceeds a certain hassle factor won't be used by the vast majority of people and thus might as well not exist as its existence doesn't make a difference. Similarly for the high-res screen, I can only imagine how slow things must have been using the graphics hardware available in 2007.
And that Toshiba G900 likely ran Windows Mobile, probably the biggest reason so few people bought and why it is almost forgotten by now.
On the contrary, some older smartphones were quite speedy in the graphics department.
For instance, my 2005 Samsung smartphone had a 520MHz cpu that I (and many others) had set to clock up to 624MHz or more automatically when busy. The first iPhone was only clocked at 412MHz to save battery.
For graphics, that 2005 Samsung phone used a PowerVR MBX Lite GPU, which is the same GPU that the 2007 iPhone and 2008 iPhone 3G used years later.
Windows Mobile 5 had also introduced DirectX 3D support. I actually learned DirectX because of that. It was easy to port desktop code over and do fluid 3D transformations and landscapes.
Btw, the Toshiba ran WM6, which came with Office Mobile, meaning you could read and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on it. As a business smartphone, it was pretty slick for its time.
Interestingly, WM was more popular than even the iPhone in many EU and Asian countries for a few years. I think it could've lasted for a longer time if MS had let it.
Microsoft did a great job with Windows phone, but they should not have dropped Windows Mobile and expect everyone to convert over. It didn't happen.
Same mistake that Blackberry did, dropping their old OS.
Many corporations had invested a lot into WM and/or BB apps, but dropping support was a no-no and they lost interest quickly, and moved to iOS and Android.
I don't know in which universe you are living if you think Windows Mobile or the 'classic' BB OS would retain any economically viable market share after the iPhone and Android.