If it wasn't clear enough, I was saying your joke didn't land. Hence - don't quit your day job for a career in comedy. Which is indeed proper usage of the phrase. Sorry if you were offended - it was intended to be repartee.
For what it's worth, while I didn't like your comments, none of them deserved to be flagged - which this site has an annoying obsession with using to censor anyone's opinion who comes across with bite or even just contrarian, which has its place on the internet despite what the mods here believe.
> I just think it's silly when you guys cry that modern sites don't support your decrepit charity browser.
>
> Clearly you took it so personally that you dug through my comment history.
I look through most comment histories before responding. Because of this, I know that you are mostly reasonable on other topics. I find it interesting that you think prodding back is "crying", can you not take it as well as you deal it?
What did Mozilla do to you that makes you go from reasonable javascript coder to raging troll on this one specific topic?
It's been around for a half decade or more I think it's here to stay. If it really impacted sales you'd expect people to have figured it out and stopped using it by now.
Wow, this pitch really hooks you, and then halfway through the glitch-heavy presentation you're made aware that this is just a cheap controller for your Apple Watch, and that literally every feature they are advertising is a feature of the Watch, not their product.
I would never buy this because it sounds like drop-shipped garbage. The marketing should be more straightforward and tell you what this thing actually is upfront, instead of burying the lede and acting like they made a new kind of phone.
a lot of negative comments here but i think this is really neat! It is unclear what the case adds besides the form factor and buttons. Is that the main value or does the case provide charging or additional memory or anything like that?
> "What goes around, comes around! Rediscover the delight of tactile scrolling with tinyPod’s physical scroll wheel. And yes, it actually scrolls. How? Through carefully mechanized components inside, tinyPod's wheel makes direct rotation contact with your Apple Watch crown, letting it naturally scroll anything across the OS."
The how it works section says the following when you expand it:
> Through carefully mechanized components inside, tinyPod's wheel makes direct rotation contact with your Apple Watch crown, letting it naturally scroll anything across the OS.
this kinda serves of a proof of concept for just how minimal we can get with a smartphone while retaining most of the "smart". I might even try this for a bit...
I think the parent comment's point is good -- if Apple are watching (pun not intended): you could make a truly tiny phone out of watchOS, please do it.
Hard to say without phones available that cater towards other needs. I'm waiting for one that brags about not having access to most functionality outside of phone, gps, sms, and camera.
One thing the Apple Watch is missing is being able to call a Lyft or Uber. Not something I do super often but it really would let me leave the phone at home more often.
Also would have liked to see a little hole in the corner to thread a loop to.
Shortcuts was massively downgraded within one or two Apple-first releases (the original app was amazing, let me do local automations on the watch that included texting and API calls)
The one time I used the Uber Apple Watch app it requested a car but no destination. I assumed they’d just ask me where I’m going but the driver was adamant that I had to provide one, which was impossible because the reason I was using the watch app is that I’d left my phone at home.
I don’t get it. The Watch locks itself everytime it’s remove from the wrist and doesn’t stay unlocked if you unlock the screen when you’re not wearing it then let it go to standby.
So… you would have to input a pin every single time you use this contraption? Seems quite annoying compared to, you know, wearing the watch.
i guess it's the same as phones, before biometric authentication? but in general yeah, the watch was not designed to be used like this and anyone who's used a watch should be able to predict how bad the UX is gonna be...
We did? I don’t recall an accessory like that for the nano. Seems it would have been too tall (wide?) to function as a watch. Happy to be proven wrong though.
It was a ver common phrase. I think its been lost to history but right before "TikTok" the phrase "tic tock" was getting popular as a way to say, "the second-by-second run down", e.g. give me the tic tock.
>I feel like the most popular pre-app wide popular usage would’ve been the Ke$ha song.
Agreed, a lot of the alternative usages that people are mentioning seem fake and I don't recall any of them being a thing. The only usage I recall being widespread was people saying tick tock to tell you to hurry up implying that the hands of a clock are moving. That and the little known novel from the 80's about a sentient murderous robot.
I believe that by the end of the century half of the most common words of the English language will have been hostilely taken over and ruined by tech companies.
I still own multiple nanos with the watch bands and the kids love playing with them as a ”more kid-safe Apple Watch”. Even after all these years they’re still immaculate and work great. More than can be said by lots of other more recent technology.
Oh man I loved my iPod nano! I had the square one, and used to fill it with music and podcasts through a cable. I wish I had known there were cases to turn it into a watch
This claims multi-day battery life, since wrist detection can be turned off. I’m curious to know how much of a difference this one change makes. I haven’t bought an AW because the battery life isn’t good enough for a “watch” in my book, but if it can get multiple days of life, and it’s more like a phone replacement, then I’d be more likely to give it a try.
I have never understood why AWs consume so much battery at rest. I have a Garmin that lasts for several days, and I would be happy to have an AW what doesn't do all the stuff the AW does, but which is made by Apple. It could be a dumbed-down version that just vibrates and displays messages that I receive. I basically want a smartwatch so I can avoid phantom vibrations, and so I can quickly see what messages have come in so I don't have to get out my phone all the time.
Is this an issue with WatchOS, the chipset being used, or the size of battery they have chosen? I know a lot of people out there who do not consider an AW or any other smartwatch because they don't want to have yet another device to charge daily. There are other companies that have achieved very good battery life (Amazfit, Garmin, Pebble), so it is clearly possible to have weeks-long battery life with a feature set that is more than enough for people like me.
I feel like I'll never have an AW until they decide to make an AWU-sized device, but with more battery and fewer hardcore workout sensors. I don't need to dive with my watch, or have it utilize multiple satellites for GPS. What I do need for a watch is to have it last for more than a day or two, so I don't have to bring a charger whenever I go on a trip.
Is this an issue with WatchOS, the chipset being used, or the size of battery they have chosen?
It is the screen (and cell radio, as I’ll note below). Note that when Garmin started putting OLED screens in their watches, the battery life dropped dramatically compared to a watch with similar innards, but a MIP display.
However, Garmin will still beat an Apple Watch for battery life even with an OLED display, because as you point out, the AW is doing a lot more in the background. And firing up that cellular radio is not cheap on battery, either. I’ve got a Garmin 945LTE with an LTE radio, and let me tell you that when that thing can’t find a cell tower, it’ll crank that radio up and burn through a battery in no time. Not so much that I’ve run out, but enough that I definitely noticed a large difference. It makes me wonder if that isn’t the reason the 945 LTE has been neglected and no other adult watches have been made with cell radios.
But, yes, make a “not so much stuff in the background” mode. If I’m in the middle of a 50 mile race, I don’t need email. I don’t need a lot of background refreshing. The AW does have a mode like that, but without going into a long spiel, I think Apple could do better.
For Apple-blessed stuff only. They tightened third-party widget update budget so badly third-party widgets that should provide up-to-date information are essentially unusable. E.g. large Weathergraph widget still works because it shows a day-long forecast, so being an hour old is rarely noticeable, but Fantastical (can keep showing outdated event for a while and miss the actual schedule) or Battery Grapher (can be up to 30 percent points off from the actual battery status) are absolutely unusable.
If you know about the events in advance, you can hand them to watchOS and have it display them for you. So I'm surprised to see calendar apps struggling with this…
Thanks - Weathergraph author here. The tightened update budgets are just a part of a puzzle, another bad parts are:
- no background updates (for non-Apple apps, of course) once the low power mode is enabled
- a buch of long unfixed bugs, like this one https://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=5568946145067008 - a WidgetKit cache of rendered widgets gets randomly corrupted (race issue when rendering maybe? seems to happen more often with a complex widgets), and once it happens, the specific widget stops updating until device restart (and app has no way of finding out that this happens)
Off-topic: thank you for the app! It's (subjectively, of course) by far the best weather widget out there - and I've tried a number of them. Really appreciate your work.
I've found the Ultra comfortably lasts for two days if I don't wear it overnight, but that might change if I used it more actively in this form factor.
I've always wanted to take an apple watch and use it like a flip phone! This is pretty fun! I've never wanted the distraction of an apple watch and I appreciate the ability to put this thing in a pocket.
I unapologetically love this thing. It's of course very silly, and I'm sure commenters here are going to talk about all the ways that it isn't practical or that it's a niche idea, but I love whimsical silly niche hardware ideas that make it into actual hardware. I love that they put in all of the effort to figure out a mechanical linkage between the clickwheel and the digital crown!
I don't think all hardware needs to be take-over-the-world hundred-million-unit ideas; I think sometimes it's fine for hardware to be whimsical niche things like this Apple Watch case or Andrew McCalip's doomscroller doo-dad [1]!
Funnily enough the inspiration may have come from Apple themselves, before the Watch was announced they covertly tested it in cases made to resemble an iPod knock-off.
Does it at least do anything well? An iPod replacement would be fun, but the best thing about an iPod was the wired headphones.
This would only work with my AirPods, which almost never work without fiddling with something either in the UI or by taking them in and out of their case.
Beyond storage some of the other "best things" were the easy to navigate UI with the click wheel, instead of the finicky buttons or multiple repeated swipes that other devices required. Also the iTunes integration. Having a solid music app on the desktop, that made it easy to create playlists, which could that automatically sync with the iPod so everything was there without a bunch of work, was a game changer when it launched. I bought my first Mac to get iTunes, because the software on Windows at the time sucked so bad.
They could theoretically add a headphone port to this and a bluetooth to headphone adapter. I don't think the chips for that take up much space at all.
Beg to differ -- this is quite valuable as a new kind of paging device that you want to keep around instead of your higher end iPhone's battery constantly draining, and more importantly, for people who'd like to keep radiation at a distance.
(Yeah, no, I'm not saying you should keep away from radiation, just that some people do prefer to and it's therefore a market segment.)
You would certainly notice if your genitals were absorbing enough energy via RF emissions to pose any kind of hazard. You would probably notice long before that threshold.
That makes no sense. Phones and watches mostly use 4g and wifi band signals which both go through thin plastic shells and indeed your entire body without interference.
Distance decreases the intensity of exposure. I'm not trying to achieve complete avoidance, just a decrease of risk.
To those who down-voted (actually or even as a psychological reaction) my original comment: consider for a moment that while this might be a fringe opinion, it is not without some evidence.
If you think rats getting cancer from radiation is not relevant evidence, that's your personal opinion, not the most scientifically validated hypothesis.
From the linked NIH page about the study (via the Wayback Machine):
> “The exposures used in the studies cannot be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience when using a cell phone,” said John Bucher, Ph.D., NTP senior scientist. “In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies. By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone. In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.”
Sure, but is causing a little damage to a tiny part of the body acceptable? Exposure levels and durations -- common sense would suggest those are going up with people using more devices for more time every day.
I was not inclined to believe this whole radiation business for such reasons too -- "it's one study", "if it were so bad this would make front-page of the NYT", "entire labs of scientists and governments cannot be lying about this", "it's non-ionizing radiation, that's why it's safe you idiot!" etc.
What made me look a little deeper was Huberman's AMA on EMF. It's become fashionable to dunk on him now but it gave me a pause in that I began to wonder if there might be some merit to this after all.
Ultimately, this is like assessing the evidence for any other controversial topic -- unless you're working in R&D on radiation yourself, individual retail consumers of research like us can rely on the published evidence only to a certain extent. Beyond that, it's your priors, risk thresholds and heuristics for who to trust that will determine what you believe.
Would that be Andrew Huberman? The podcaster and self-promoter whose former research specialism has nothing remotely to do with RF, or indeed radiation of any variety? You should consider the possibility it has become fashionable to dunk on him because he deserves to be dunked on.
> Sure, but is causing a little damage to a tiny part of the body acceptable?
I'll answer that question once you've shown credibly that it is meaningful in this context.
Huberman is not citing any evidence or meaningful research in his conclusions. He’s fear mongering over a fringe concern without merit. He’s dunked on because he leans on bunk science
Which, when you think of it, (smart or dumb) mobile phones kind of have been for a while already for people that don't wear (smart or dumb) watches.
Tangentially I sort of lament the progressive disappearance of wall and street clocks, presumably caused by the constant availability of time in one's pocket (before that not everyone wore a watch but everyone soon had a mobile phone with time)
I remember from my kid/teenage years that there used to be a lot of clocks in the environment, both analog and digital, both public and private (e.g. digital clock scrolling between ads on a LED billboard over a store). I do also remember you couldn't exactly trust them - often enough, they would be broken, or they would show the wrong time for weeks after switching from/to DST. Analog clocks were the worst, because they rarely had a second hand, so you couldn't easily tell if they're working at all.
Meanwhile, I am tired of my internal drives running out of space, and I don't trust the cloud. Flash drives and external drives are too expensive. I have a totally original idea of removable media that is inexpensive, flat for easy travel, uses magnetic high capacity storage, and even had a writable surface to remember what's on it with a simple marker! Brilliant, I know. And I have big plans to use BOTH sides for even more storage, as well as a special notch to distinguish when the contents are read only.
I don't think this is silly in the slightest. There are lots of folks like me who deliberately want to break our phone addictions, which is why things like www.thelightphone.com exist.
My problem with the Light Phone (owner of version II) is that it's too limited. I don't want to be distracted by notifications or social media or doom scrolling on the browser, but I do need things that are essentially task-oriented tools: Uber/Lyft, Weather apps, Maps, Authenticator Code apps (and, now, using my phone as a passkey), etc.
I'm not an iOS user, but this makes be almost wish I were, because it's exactly what I'd want. It's too small to make me want to scroll YouTube randomly, but has all the tools that I don't want to forego. I think this is a fantastic product if it works as advertised.
They recently announced a v3 of the light phone that might actually be useful - I also have a light phone II sitting in a drawer somewhere.
It ditches e-ink in favor of an OLED + matte glass that looks amazing. Having 60hz refresh rate means we can get nice responsive apps while keeping the minimalist UI. Hopefully they will make it easier to develop and run custom apps on this one.
> but I do need things that are essentially task-oriented tools: Uber/Lyft, Weather apps, Maps, Authenticator Code apps
> because it's exactly what I'd want.
I’m not sure it is.
Most of the things you list aren’t that functional on Watch, in my experience. It’s ok-ish to pull up on Watch after you’ve set it up on your phone, but without a phone, Watch is much more limited, IME.
You can definitely use Watch for a number of things without an iPhone — Weather is one you list that is mostly functional, Timer, and Calculator.
But beyond these basic by-design limited functionality apps, Watch doesn’t do a great job as the main driver of most apps — just more as a companion to the iPhone apps.
For better or worse, that is the inherent assumption - that a smartwatch is a companion device to a smartphone. The idea of ditching the phone entirely is, arguably, an unintended consequence of releasing smartwatch variants with built-in LTE connectivity. Giving the app developers the benefit of doubt, it's understandable they don't want to make a standalone app for a fraction off the smartwatch models, where they can do with one simpler extension app for all smartwatches.
>Most of the things you list aren’t that functional on Watch, in my experience. It’s ok-ish to pull up on Watch after you’ve set it up on your phone, but without a phone, Watch is much more limited
It's okay to not pretend that Apple trademarked the word "watch".
Calling it "Watch" looks/sounds incredibly awkward.
I've had the issue in the past where Apple's auto-correction would capitalize "Watch" every time I typed it.
It doesn't seem to do it on my iPhone now unless it's directly preceded by "Apple." But I wonder if they're hitting that because I notice a lot of different people are capitalizing the word.
>It’s ok-ish to pull up on Watch after you’ve set it up on your phone, but without a phone, Watch is much more limited, IME.
Don't you normally still have a phone nearby and synced to the watch? I don't think I know anyone that uses a smart watch in lieu of a phone, just as an accessory that keeps them from having to pull out their phone.
This entire point of this product is to use the apple watch inside this case instead of a phone. If you're using this product, no, you won't have a phone nearby and synced to it.
There are other options in the Android space. Very very few, sadly, but they exist: check out the Qin phones like the F21 Pro: it's Android on a 2007's Nokia form factor!
I feel like once you set third-party apps like Uber, bike rental or banking apps as requirements, the only possible solution is sadly a mostly standard cut-down Android phone. The third parties won't support any bespoke OS, so you're stuck with iOS or Android, and moreover they won't support exotic configurations like a tiny display.
Thankfully on Android it's easy enough to remove/disable any distractions, and there are phones like the ones from Unihertz that are just different enough to be worth trying.
> It's of course very silly, and I'm sure commenters here are going to talk about all the ways that it isn't practical or that it's a niche idea, but I love whimsical silly niche hardware ideas that make it into actual hardware
It's crazy how I miss my 2nd gen iPod Nano, even though I wouldn't really have any use for it today. It was really a stupendously satisfying specialised device whose use is completely obviated today by general purpose smartphones.
The website is trade dress to the max. The average user would probably scroll through the page and assume this is an official product from Apple. Their logo is deceptively similar to Apple's, the name of the product is similar, the click wheel design is possibly infringing on some patent Apple owns.
I think my perfect phone would be if Apple chopped an inch or an inch and a half off the bottom of the iPhone 12 mini and ran a slightly improved watchOS on it.
OK, in this vein, why oh why did Lyft and Uber remove their apple watch apps? I just need an app that's a single "take me home now" button so I don't have to worry about my phone battery dying when I'm out and about. Pretty please?
A taxi with pre-calculated price, driver and vehicle rating, that actually arrives on time and the driver can't take you around the city with a boosted taxameter to overcharge you. Amazing indeed.
On time? Here in europe (Germany, Poland, CZ) you get ETA 7 minutes, but real time is 10-12 minutes every time. It's going down and only the cost agreement is now better than taxi. Money, as always, is the only matter working here.
I don't know anything about germany but here in the US except for a few select cities, taxi service was garbage and user hostile. Uber improved it in every way. Uber gives me confidence that almost everywhere in the US I can get a predictable ride.
You’re complaining about a five minute difference between estimated and actual time of arrival? U. S. taxis would have you standing in the rain for an hour past promised pickup, and maybe they just don’t show at all. There are good reasons that Uber, et al., were practically overnight successes.
Thanks for perfectly illustrating the impact of Uber - now you complain about few minutes!
I used a "real taxi" a lot in Germany, Poland and CZ before Uber. The best approximate they gave me was "in half an hour" and it usually was more like 45-60 minutes, if it arrived at all. The usual thing to do was to take one passing by, but that got you a terrible smelly car with a ganster driver that overcharged 2x-5x.
Since you mention CZ - the taxi mafia in Prague was especially legendary. Can't thank Uber enough for disrupting that.
Completely speculating, but when an App Store review process can drive business decisions (we have to push the launch of X back because we're having trouble lobbying Apple to approve our changes), it's reasonable to see a second app as doubling the likelihood that you end up in that situation. And even if it weren't for the review processes, would every launch be at the mercy of reporters saying "this isn't supported on my watch, so..."?
It's also possible that each company simply lost all the people who knew the watchOS APIs, and the incremental revenue generated wasn't worth hiring for that role again, or trying to convince someone else at the company to add it to their scope.
Perhaps, as well, there was an expectation that Apple would be the one encouraging Uber to maintain and build the app, and give them favorable treatment on the App Store review processes as a way to sweeten that deal... and then when the larger relationships started to become more acrimonious, any ideas here fell by the wayside.
It's a fully mechanical shell with no electronics so you're asking for a jack in the watch itself which would be pretty comical. For this to add a jack you'd need Apple to have put in a port for 3rd party accessories and provide an API for using it.
> What if sometimes you could just…
leave your phone at home? With all the essentials to stay connected, tinyPod makes that actually possible.
But that’s a feature of an Apple Watch, this case doesn’t impact this in any way - I already leave my phone at home like this and I don’t own this case.
I also thought it was funny that they are listing features like apple pay and magnetic charging as if these features have anything to do with the case.
This. Coupled with the fact that all their promotional material looks like renders and there isn’t a single photo/video of someone actually using it, makes the whole thing feel sketchy.
362 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 374 ms ] threadEdit for clarification:
The scrolling implementation here flashes rapidly on Firefox for Mac OS.
For what it's worth, while I didn't like your comments, none of them deserved to be flagged - which this site has an annoying obsession with using to censor anyone's opinion who comes across with bite or even just contrarian, which has its place on the internet despite what the mods here believe.
Looking back at your comment history, I can at least I can thank you for recycling. Too bad you can't get carbon credits recycling jokes.
I look through most comment histories before responding. Because of this, I know that you are mostly reasonable on other topics. I find it interesting that you think prodding back is "crying", can you not take it as well as you deal it?
What did Mozilla do to you that makes you go from reasonable javascript coder to raging troll on this one specific topic?
I would never buy this because it sounds like drop-shipped garbage. The marketing should be more straightforward and tell you what this thing actually is upfront, instead of burying the lede and acting like they made a new kind of phone.
Thanks for sharing!
> Through carefully mechanized components inside, tinyPod's wheel makes direct rotation contact with your Apple Watch crown, letting it naturally scroll anything across the OS.
> It's basically Lightning minus the PWR and ID1 pins, because those are for satellite accessories.
I think the parent comment's point is good -- if Apple are watching (pun not intended): you could make a truly tiny phone out of watchOS, please do it.
Also would have liked to see a little hole in the corner to thread a loop to.
Looks like Maps lets you “request ride”, so possibly even the native maps method could work here.
The Ride Request API [1] seems closed off to developers now, too.
[1] https://developer.uber.com/docs/riders/introduction
https://www.macworld.com/article/667363/ipod-nano-6g-with-st...
But I haven’t heard it in a while.
Agreed, a lot of the alternative usages that people are mentioning seem fake and I don't recall any of them being a thing. The only usage I recall being widespread was people saying tick tock to tell you to hurry up implying that the hands of a clock are moving. That and the little known novel from the 80's about a sentient murderous robot.
My main reason why I don’t use my watch anymore is that it needs to be charged all the time.
Is this an issue with WatchOS, the chipset being used, or the size of battery they have chosen? I know a lot of people out there who do not consider an AW or any other smartwatch because they don't want to have yet another device to charge daily. There are other companies that have achieved very good battery life (Amazfit, Garmin, Pebble), so it is clearly possible to have weeks-long battery life with a feature set that is more than enough for people like me.
I feel like I'll never have an AW until they decide to make an AWU-sized device, but with more battery and fewer hardcore workout sensors. I don't need to dive with my watch, or have it utilize multiple satellites for GPS. What I do need for a watch is to have it last for more than a day or two, so I don't have to bring a charger whenever I go on a trip.
It is the screen (and cell radio, as I’ll note below). Note that when Garmin started putting OLED screens in their watches, the battery life dropped dramatically compared to a watch with similar innards, but a MIP display.
However, Garmin will still beat an Apple Watch for battery life even with an OLED display, because as you point out, the AW is doing a lot more in the background. And firing up that cellular radio is not cheap on battery, either. I’ve got a Garmin 945LTE with an LTE radio, and let me tell you that when that thing can’t find a cell tower, it’ll crank that radio up and burn through a battery in no time. Not so much that I’ve run out, but enough that I definitely noticed a large difference. It makes me wonder if that isn’t the reason the 945 LTE has been neglected and no other adult watches have been made with cell radios.
But, yes, make a “not so much stuff in the background” mode. If I’m in the middle of a 50 mile race, I don’t need email. I don’t need a lot of background refreshing. The AW does have a mode like that, but without going into a long spiel, I think Apple could do better.
For Apple-blessed stuff only. They tightened third-party widget update budget so badly third-party widgets that should provide up-to-date information are essentially unusable. E.g. large Weathergraph widget still works because it shows a day-long forecast, so being an hour old is rarely noticeable, but Fantastical (can keep showing outdated event for a while and miss the actual schedule) or Battery Grapher (can be up to 30 percent points off from the actual battery status) are absolutely unusable.
- no background updates (for non-Apple apps, of course) once the low power mode is enabled
- a buch of long unfixed bugs, like this one https://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=5568946145067008 - a WidgetKit cache of rendered widgets gets randomly corrupted (race issue when rendering maybe? seems to happen more often with a complex widgets), and once it happens, the specific widget stops updating until device restart (and app has no way of finding out that this happens)
Unfortunately the buttons are purely for aesthetics.
Also, would've been better if it folded up like a clamshell phone from the early 2000s.
I don't think all hardware needs to be take-over-the-world hundred-million-unit ideas; I think sometimes it's fine for hardware to be whimsical niche things like this Apple Watch case or Andrew McCalip's doomscroller doo-dad [1]!
[1] https://doomscroller.xyz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmgFk5hT6d8
This would only work with my AirPods, which almost never work without fiddling with something either in the UI or by taking them in and out of their case.
Beg to differ -- this is quite valuable as a new kind of paging device that you want to keep around instead of your higher end iPhone's battery constantly draining, and more importantly, for people who'd like to keep radiation at a distance.
(Yeah, no, I'm not saying you should keep away from radiation, just that some people do prefer to and it's therefore a market segment.)
To those who down-voted (actually or even as a psychological reaction) my original comment: consider for a moment that while this might be a fringe opinion, it is not without some evidence.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/07/01/health-risks-of-cell-ph...
If you think rats getting cancer from radiation is not relevant evidence, that's your personal opinion, not the most scientifically validated hypothesis.
> “The exposures used in the studies cannot be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience when using a cell phone,” said John Bucher, Ph.D., NTP senior scientist. “In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies. By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone. In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.”
'Beware the man of one study.'
I was not inclined to believe this whole radiation business for such reasons too -- "it's one study", "if it were so bad this would make front-page of the NYT", "entire labs of scientists and governments cannot be lying about this", "it's non-ionizing radiation, that's why it's safe you idiot!" etc.
What made me look a little deeper was Huberman's AMA on EMF. It's become fashionable to dunk on him now but it gave me a pause in that I began to wonder if there might be some merit to this after all.
Ultimately, this is like assessing the evidence for any other controversial topic -- unless you're working in R&D on radiation yourself, individual retail consumers of research like us can rely on the published evidence only to a certain extent. Beyond that, it's your priors, risk thresholds and heuristics for who to trust that will determine what you believe.
> Sure, but is causing a little damage to a tiny part of the body acceptable?
I'll answer that question once you've shown credibly that it is meaningful in this context.
Which, when you think of it, (smart or dumb) mobile phones kind of have been for a while already for people that don't wear (smart or dumb) watches.
Tangentially I sort of lament the progressive disappearance of wall and street clocks, presumably caused by the constant availability of time in one's pocket (before that not everyone wore a watch but everyone soon had a mobile phone with time)
Meanwhile, I am tired of my internal drives running out of space, and I don't trust the cloud. Flash drives and external drives are too expensive. I have a totally original idea of removable media that is inexpensive, flat for easy travel, uses magnetic high capacity storage, and even had a writable surface to remember what's on it with a simple marker! Brilliant, I know. And I have big plans to use BOTH sides for even more storage, as well as a special notch to distinguish when the contents are read only.
My problem with the Light Phone (owner of version II) is that it's too limited. I don't want to be distracted by notifications or social media or doom scrolling on the browser, but I do need things that are essentially task-oriented tools: Uber/Lyft, Weather apps, Maps, Authenticator Code apps (and, now, using my phone as a passkey), etc.
I'm not an iOS user, but this makes be almost wish I were, because it's exactly what I'd want. It's too small to make me want to scroll YouTube randomly, but has all the tools that I don't want to forego. I think this is a fantastic product if it works as advertised.
It ditches e-ink in favor of an OLED + matte glass that looks amazing. Having 60hz refresh rate means we can get nice responsive apps while keeping the minimalist UI. Hopefully they will make it easier to develop and run custom apps on this one.
> because it's exactly what I'd want.
I’m not sure it is.
Most of the things you list aren’t that functional on Watch, in my experience. It’s ok-ish to pull up on Watch after you’ve set it up on your phone, but without a phone, Watch is much more limited, IME.
You can definitely use Watch for a number of things without an iPhone — Weather is one you list that is mostly functional, Timer, and Calculator.
But beyond these basic by-design limited functionality apps, Watch doesn’t do a great job as the main driver of most apps — just more as a companion to the iPhone apps.
There is nothing inherent in the hardware limiting you from doing these things, but my understanding is that Apple makes it hard to do.
It's okay to not pretend that Apple trademarked the word "watch".
Calling it "Watch" looks/sounds incredibly awkward.
It doesn't seem to do it on my iPhone now unless it's directly preceded by "Apple." But I wonder if they're hitting that because I notice a lot of different people are capitalizing the word.
Don't you normally still have a phone nearby and synced to the watch? I don't think I know anyone that uses a smart watch in lieu of a phone, just as an accessory that keeps them from having to pull out their phone.
Thankfully on Android it's easy enough to remove/disable any distractions, and there are phones like the ones from Unihertz that are just different enough to be worth trying.
It's crazy how I miss my 2nd gen iPod Nano, even though I wouldn't really have any use for it today. It was really a stupendously satisfying specialised device whose use is completely obviated today by general purpose smartphones.
But then again I wear watches...
I'm not really into the apple ecosystem, but I kinda like this as well. Smart watches don't really appeal to me, but something like this does.
https://www.uber.com/au/en/ride/call-to-ride/
https://support.apple.com/guide/watch/make-phone-calls-apdc3...
What’s even worse is the ETA they give you before booking the ride. Still better than taxi in general , but that’s a low bar.
I used a "real taxi" a lot in Germany, Poland and CZ before Uber. The best approximate they gave me was "in half an hour" and it usually was more like 45-60 minutes, if it arrived at all. The usual thing to do was to take one passing by, but that got you a terrible smelly car with a ganster driver that overcharged 2x-5x.
Since you mention CZ - the taxi mafia in Prague was especially legendary. Can't thank Uber enough for disrupting that.
It's also possible that each company simply lost all the people who knew the watchOS APIs, and the incremental revenue generated wasn't worth hiring for that role again, or trying to convince someone else at the company to add it to their scope.
Perhaps, as well, there was an expectation that Apple would be the one encouraging Uber to maintain and build the app, and give them favorable treatment on the App Store review processes as a way to sweeten that deal... and then when the larger relationships started to become more acrimonious, any ideas here fell by the wayside.
But that’s a feature of an Apple Watch, this case doesn’t impact this in any way - I already leave my phone at home like this and I don’t own this case.
I also seldom, if ever, leave my house with my iPhone.