You ever used your phone as a hotspot?
- it uses battery
- it gets hot
how you'd like your watch to get hot and die after maybe an hour of use?
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How long for a standalone watch
- Thread starter Will0827
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You ever used your phone as a hotspot?
- it uses battery
- it gets hot
how you'd like your watch to get hot and die after maybe an hour of use?
Well, okay. Those are problems that have to be resolved before the idea becomes practical. Doesn't mean that the idea itself doesn't have merit.
How far in the future are we talking? Personally, I'd like to see solar battery power, 3D projected screen and star trek caliber voice recognition.
How far in the future are we talking? Personally, I'd like to see solar battery power, 3D projected screen and star trek caliber voice recognition.
Not an engineer, so no idea.
Hope it happens within my lifetime.
In the meantime, if the watch can have its own cellular connection, and the carriers let me add it for an extra ~$10 a month, I'll take that.
Not an engineer, so no idea.
Hope it happens within my lifetime.
In the meantime, if the watch can have its own cellular connection, and the carriers let me add it for an extra ~$10 a month, I'll take that.
Battery is still a problem man. I don't use my phone as a hotspot unless its plugged in. Battery drain is not fun when you run a hotspot.
This is here already with other products (LG and Samsung). I just do not like the way that they look. So, we won't have to wait for you to die before this becomes a reality.
Apple would not have to solve this as a WiFi hotspot, they could do it through Bluetooth or some other proprietary Apple thing. After all, Apple loves is proprietary interfaces. It just needs to be a data and voice broker across UI devices. It could be WiFi, it could be Bluetooth, or it could be a variation that gives the tethered device the speed without the power drain. Other vendors that are likely to build to an open standard may need a legacy hotspot approach, but not Apple if they design it holistically within their framework.
I think this is dead on. I bet your watch will acts as a 'hotspot' of sorts that feeds data to your different computing form factors. Unless of course some other wearable takes that role.
Ok, then imagine being surrounded by 'dumb terminals' of sorts that automatically connect to the web when you approach them through your watch. What if carrying a device in your pocket becomes antiquated? What if every surface could become a display that piggybacks off of your watch based on proximity? What if your watch could wirelessly feed data to your HUD that's integrated into your contact lenses? To say that the watch will NEVER be independent of the iPhone is silly. The future is approaching faster than we think.
That future isn't coming that fast I don't think. I'm still waiting for smartphones that fold/unfold like a wallet to present the maxmium screen size with no seams. Samsung debuted flexible screens a few years ago and I have yet to see that implemented anywhere.
There are two separate radios that would need to be involved - one that connects the watch to the device using it as a hotspot, which could use any technology capable of being instituted on both devices and be as low-power as it can get. However, the other one is the cellular radio, which relies on existing technologies and is, by the nature of having to communicate over fairly long range for the frequencies involved, a fairly high power device.
The stumbling block is an active cellular radio will always create notable battery drain, and the one thing the watch doesn't have, is a battery with sufficient capacity for that. Yet.
There are no battery technologies anywhere near being realized at this time which could provide a watch-sized device with enough power to offer voice or data over more than a few minutes and yet still have several hours standby. When you think that an iPhone 5s, which is about 60% or so battery, can barely last more than a day with regular use before requiring a charge, it gives some idea how much battery technology has to improve to be able to get that performance into something small enough for a watch.
I like the idea of a standalone watch, and I'm sure it will come one day, but it's hard to see it being soon, particularly since battery technology is moving at a much slower pace than information/communications technologies are.
If that's the case, how does the Samsung standalone watch work? I think Sony also had one?
It's not that such a device can't be made, but it isn't possible to overcome physics, so battery life was, and remains, awful. I suspect that other manufacturers than Apple are likely prepared to make bulkier watches to allow for larger batteries, thus better usage times, but the one thing Apple seem unprepared to compromise is product design, and they've demonstrated with the current product that a larger device for better battery life isn't on their design agenda.
Not that I have any inside information, but this is not hard to glean from the evidence so far.
Samsung Gear S gives 4 days standby time and 5 hours talk time (over BT). It has a dual-core CPU, so it is not a technical slouch. Its battery is only 50% larger than the AW battery. If Samsung can get there, then Apple can with all its vast resources.
The Gear S is larger than I prefer, that is why I like the elegant platform of the AW. However, the base capability has been commercially available for a long time.
The good news is that this is not impossible, because others have already been doing it for a few years. I am looking forward to Apple's advances in a year or two.
I agree that the Gear S is too big and inelegant, but reviews state it has a two-day battery life. So it feels like a smaller and elegant Apple standalone watch should be several years away, rather than decades away. Am I wrong?
Well take for instance OS2 will let you do face time audio. This is fully in apples domain. The actual call would be in carrier domain. I think apple is getting this whole merged existence thing down. Carriers are just now getting VOLTE spun up, and half of them still can't hand off to say wifi. I posit even T-Mobile has a nasty drop call issue when going from wifi to VOLTE. They are just not very good at moving a call while in motion yet. This would need to be ironed out even if said device had a LTE radio in it. So we have a few moving parts left to perfect, I would say 5 years is when you can expect to see a bully integrated apple watch with voice and data into a nexus. The carriers will be on 5g roll out and a heavy saturation of 4g and complete re-frame of 3g to 5g. This is clutch for apple to make this device happen and sing.
Here is overall volume of watch main:
Apple 42mm: 42mm x 35.9mm x 10mm = 15078 mm^3
Apple 38mm: 38.6mm x 33.3mm x 10mm = 12853.8 mm^3
Samsung Gear S: 58.3mm x 39.8mm x 12.5mm = 29004.25 mm^3
Samsung has more than twice of volume than 38mm AW and almost twice of volume than 42mm AW.
When you design something with twice of volume, you should be able to put a bigger battery and more device, if you use similar technology.
If Apple come up with a cellular version AW, it will likely have to be bigger with current battery and IC technology, and maybe similar size as Samsung Gear S, which is too ugly to go on my wrist. It really look like a small smartphone strapped on the wrist.
Yep, mine will drop the call almost every time I walk into my house on a call. Though, I believe it is an Apple iPhone problem and not so much the TMO problem. I have been using WiFi calling for as long as T-Mobile offered it, starting with a Sony-Ericsson phone long ago and through several Blackberries. I have only experienced the dropped call issues with the iPhone when it became available.
This does not surprise me. I hope apple can perfect the hand off here in the local BT space and expand that out. I am not sure what apple can do except increase speed which OS2 will do and increase Battery life. I think watch 2 and 3 will focus on these areas.
I don't see the appeal of a standalone watch, at least as far as cellular capabilities go. It's far too small for web browsing, and I doubt many people would want to constantly wear a bluetooth headset, talk on speakerphone or dictate messages every time they wanted to communicate with someone. And that's not even considering how uncomfortable all those things would be on an Apple Watch.
There already is a "Stand Alone Watch"
More like strapping a 1st Gen iPhone on your wrist to be honest...
http://www.neptunepine.com/#experiment
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/neptune-pine-smartwatch-black/9802116.p?id=1219438695423&skuId=9802116
More like strapping a 1st Gen iPhone on your wrist to be honest...
http://www.neptunepine.com/#experiment
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/neptune-pine-smartwatch-black/9802116.p?id=1219438695423&skuId=9802116
I agree. I think we will see a evolution of efficiency. the SOC is already pretty fast and plenty of ram for the size of display and content it can run. I know there is already a smaller fab process to shrink the SOC down and this should give us a few more hours of run time and maybe reduce some lag in the native app switching. Though that is mostly ram dependent and with 512 meg of ram i have a hard time thinking that will a bottle neck going forward for at least 18 months till apps really flesh out and start to eat that nectar.