Growing up a to be a tech addict/gadget freak (Part I)

The early years

Just a dream at first

When did it all start? That is a tough one to answer, i have to admit.  I do recall a dream (no, i mean really dreaming - while being asleep) i had when i was 10 years old that my parents bought me a computer.  It was an Apple III (sort of) like thing in a bright white dreamy kind of colour.  (<Nerd Alert>Who can identify the brand and model of the laptop the girl is (okay, pretending to be) sleeping on?</Nerd Alert>)

Spectrum ZX

There was a friend of mine (same age) back then who owned (and even programmed in plain old BASIC) a Spectrum ZX (can't remember the exact model though) with a built-in (or maybe detachable - can't be sure) cassette recorder.  I am talking about crazy stuff here.  I can remember going  out in the backyard and playing basketball (i may be the only person on our side of the galaxy that has never ever managed to score a field goal worth of two points and this by no means is an exaggeration) for like 20 minutes while a game was loading!  Didn't matter though because we had plenty of free time and it was an honest to God real computer we were fiddling with.  (For those who may wonder, that particular boy - a true pioneer as far as i am concerned - grew up to become a software developer, of course).

My own PC

So i am 13 years old, it is June 21 (a fantastic sunny Friday as well as the biggest day of the year, if i may add) and my parents bring home as a gift my first ever computer (payed for it a huge amount of money - i think it was actually more than the entire monthly family income).  The infamous IBM PS/1 (model 2011), a real PC with a 80286 10 MHz processor, 1 MByte of RAM, a 30MB HDD and a VGA screen with 256 colours!!!! When i unboxed and connected it to the mains power supply i felt like the world was mine.  I stopped eating for like two days (wish that could happen nowadays also) and sat in front of the monitor for 13 hours straight, until my mom came and physically lifted me from the chair, while at the same time yelling incomprehensible threats that may have been related to her unplugging it forever if i do not go to bed.  Or even smashing it into a thousand pieces with a hammer.  So i went to bed.  But i did not sleep that night.  Who needs sleep when he is 13 and has his own PC (even if that particular IBM PC proved out to be actually incompatible with the cheaper IBM PC compatible ones - i know it sounds peculiar but it sadly is the bitter conclusion)?  Oh, and the year is 1991, let me add.

The video games era

On my PC i used to play adventure games (and i had a pascal compiler - or was it an interpreter? - installed and even coded simple stuff. See dad? It was a good decision spending all that money on my PC).  Lucasfilm games (later called Lucasarts entertainment) and Sierra titles mostly.  Monkey Island, Indiana Jones (The Fate Of Atlantis is possibly the best game i have ever played - my gaming career ended by 1999 though so i must have missed a lot of great things) and the Larry ("My son is becoming a real computer wiz! His teacher called him a 'master byter'".) series were games that i very much enjoyed.  But there were friends of mine (one of them is this guy) who owned games consoles (Sega MegaDrive, Nintendo SNES) and i have spent (way too) many hours of my youth trying to master the fine art of digitised sprites' heart tearing - my favourite fighter was Kano - combos in Mortal Kombat (The SEGA version had all the blood, whereas in the SNES one the censorship forces well uhmmm forced the developers to colour it green! Green blood for God's sake! And those who dictated that freaky mutation are possibly still among us making decisions...)

The seed of my love for all tech things portable

After i bought my first GameBoy (the original one) it clearly became apparent that it was the portability aspect that i mostly enjoyed in gadgets.  Even if i never took them out of my house (i know it sounds a little concerning...)!  I do not know how to explain it though (there has to be some psychoanalytical explanation, of course).  Even nowadays, i am inclined to prefer a high end cellphone to a 60 inch smart TV that costs five times more.  (Please note that in (the slightly remote - i know) chance that you decide to send me a wedding gift.)  To make things even worse i must publicly admit that sometimes i do not even care about the real functionality of a particular product, as long as it is small and shiny and has a motherboard and an LCD screen.

Want to know if you are the "I want it!" or the "Is it useful?" type of person? All you have to do is click this.  It is a pair of Digital Recording Binoculars that costs two grand and is absolutely of no use to me.  But i still want it. What about you? You get it now or should i call the shrink to explain in detail?

The gadget loving days

The day the earth stood still

--- to be continued

The smartphone dictatorship

The smartphone dictatorship

You name it, your smartphone can do it.  Surf the web – check, start your car – check, control an aerial UAV – check, act as a remote control for almost everything electronic inside your house – check, really boring staff (e.g. phone calls, SMS and uhmm other boring staff) – check, workout your abs – check, take stills and videos and instantly upload them to social networks – check, communicate with your shoes – check, play 3D games – check, make coffee – check, verify that your "significant other half" is cheating – check, measure your "bedroom performance" – check, analyse urine samples on the go – check.  This list can go on and on and on but I am typing on my smartphone right now and I will try to keep it short, because thumb typing on the tiny on screen keyboard is not very convenient (I bet you knew that already, but I had to stress it out).

I for once rarely ever turned my PC on, while my tablet too was gathering dust most of the time. Why is that?

Because I could do almost everything I would normally (before the super smartphone era) do with my PC/laptop/netbook/tablet with just one small, lustworthy device that I am condemned (and blessed) to always carry with me. So is there a problem with that?

You bet there is. Face it people. Smartphones can do many many things, but if you want a decent camera you still have to go get an SLR. If you want to browse the web, of course you can do it on an iPhone, but still a 10 inch tablet screen or even better a 23 inch IPS desktop panel will provide a vastly better experience.

Okay, you can sit on the couch and try to do everything with your smartphone. I have been doing this for a while, until my tech illiterate father asked me the million dollar question: “Son, why don’t you turn your computer on anymore; Can’t it do what your cell phone does?”

Thank you dad. For pointing out the obvious.

Well, dad is not actually suggesting that you ditch your smartphone and go get yourself the 14 or so devices that you can substitute with it.  What he is saying is, since you may already happen to own (or have access to) a laptop, a tablet, a netbook and a games console and since you cannot possibly be on the road ALL the time, just do yourself a big favour and use these instead, at least when you are at home.

To sum up, no one can deny that the smartphone has changed our lives for the better. But more and more people seem to only use their smartphone instead of other (more capable and suitable) devices, even when at home. We ended up making our lives more difficult, even miserable sometimes. Do we want this? Do we have to keep doing this? No and no.

To paraphrase the great Martin Luther King Jr., I have a dream that one day we will manage to deny the convergence utopia, where one device does it all and everyone is happy with that. I have a dream that one day we will be able to send the new dictator – the smartphone – back to where it belongs and that is not home.

(Still, I started typing this post on my iPhone.  But when I came home I switched to my MacBook.  And it was way better.  Try it out and see for yourselves.)

An Apple solution to "The Schnitzel Problem"

The Schnitzel problem

Having owned a lot of headsets (another dedicated post is in the pipeline) since Sep. 1997 (this is when it all started (this one also deserves another post sooner rather than later) - a rather dark day for my future paycheques), more than thirty of which were smartphones, i have to admit that during the last two years my (primary) phone has always been an iPhone. Yep.

I also had the original iPhone back in 2007 for a few days but (one could partly blame the initial FW as well as my AHD condition - Apple Haters' Disorder - back then) it was a few billion light years bellow the WinMo smartphones competition so i got rid of it fast.  For those who remember, there was no way to copy paste in the iOS at the time! Although i must admit that i was fairly impressed by the capacitive screen and the orientation sensor. FF to March 2011 when i got my iPhone 4, then on November 2011 came the very originally designed 4S and on December this year i purchased the very latest incarnation of the dead alive (loud applaud here) - the "honey, i elongated the iPhone while screwing a great design in the process" iPhone 5.

Have you ever been to Vienna? If it is schnitzels you desire, this is place to be in! Oh, they also have the Opera, but who cares? I have been there once (Vienna i mean, not the opera), at a very nice restaurant -called Figlmüller- which was famous for it's schnitzels.  You may imagine this particular piece of meat as a rough circle with a radius of about 15 cm, while being wafer thin. No need to imagine it, i found a picture of it! It was served as is, no mashed potatoes side, only with a tiny slice of lemon. Just the meat (which was delicious). However there was a slight problem...

• Definition of the problem: The schnitzel was bigger than the round plate it was being served into. Which was kind of akward because when trying to slice the meat while being near the edge there was no dish beneath. Also, if you folded the meat in half then you lost the "wafer thin" attribute which was one of the selling points.  Generally speaking, handling the otherwise great tasting piece of meat was not easy/functional/practical.  (Don't worry though, i managed.)
• Obvious sollution: Get a larger round plate, so that the schnitzel fits in its entirety.
• Prior to iPhone 5 Apple provided sollution: "You do not really want a shnitzel of such proportions. You may not know it yet but what you really need is smaller schnitzel. Repeat this for 100.000.000 times and then you should be healed. Because we know better than you what you actually like."
• Apple sollution in the iPhone 5 era: Provide the same shnitzel in an elongated ellipsoid plate that almost (but not quite) fits the meat along it's length but NOT AT ALL along it's width, after hearing a nice gentleman with a soothing voice (Sir Jonathan Ive) explain to you that a big enough round plate (obvious sollution) is something not good for you because the way you hold your plate your fingers cannot utilize the extra width of a larger plate because uhmm that's the way it actually is and you are a little dumb not to know it already but okay you may be forgiven if you select the ellipsoid plate that you hate in the first place but since you are a sinner (for wanting a larger plate, although you have been explicitly ordered not to ever want smth like that) you are going to pay a huge premium for that. Get the meaning or is it only clear in my twisted mind?

You don't? Let me switch to glorious analog and proudly present the bellow grainy sketch on an piece of paper (which was stained with tomato - had some sandwiches a while before) so i had to crop the image before you have the chance to admire my scribble.

Now let me bring the yummy schnitzel analogy to the iPhone design issue. The plate is the smartphone screen and the schnitzel is the information that we want to see on screen. The amount of info has been multiplying the last few years, while in the same time network costs for a flat UMTS or even 4G data plan have been reduced to bearable levels almost all over the world. Which means that there is available -as well as easy to grab while on the move- a substantial amount of information.  Still, the iPhone's screen has remained 3,5 inches in diagonal since 2007. (Yes retina quadrapled the number of pixels -the original 480 by 360 pixel resolution was indeed a bad joke-, but still the screen remained very small when compared to other high end smartphones.) 

You see, more and more people (see this) are willing to browse the web and watch videos and process images and videos and even read books on their cellphones, because they always carry them and are sometimes too bored to use a tablet or a PC (can't blame them, that's for sure).  So the plate was small while the shnitzel is getting bigger all the time.  Other big plates have been available and competition became fierce.  Apple has finally been forced to understand that people wanted a bigger screen, since 3,5" retina or not, are simply not enough.  So they had to betray their number one princliple, the commandment above all commandments!  They could not dictate to people that a 3.5 inch screen was the best for them anymore. WOW!

And what did they do? Preserving the iPhone 4 design, which may actually be the Holy Grail as far as they're  concerned, they decided to make it a little thinner and also boost the screen diagonal from 3,5" to 4" while going from a yummy, healthy 4:3 960 by 640 pixels screen (see photo on the left) to an -almost- anorexic 16:9 1136*640 pixels (see photo on the right). 

Result: A pretty lady that is stretched vertically, kind of like what we have to endure with 16:9 flat screen TVs and 4:3 content that is forced to feed the 16:9 screen in it's entirety, though in reverse.  So sorry about this Jessica...

You may already have figured out by now, but i actually do hate the iPhone 5 design.  I really wanted to love it, i tried hard.  But i just can't.  Why is it still my phone then?

It is essentially very simple: It still provides the best overall experience (expect another post about this sometime soon) compared to any other (normally sized for average people, that is) phone currently available on the market.  Even though calling it ugly is a real understatement.  

Let me here sum up my iPhone (love) life of the last two years, what it feels like (kind of):

• iPhone 4
• First very passionate few weeks with a crazy/beautiful girlfriend!
• iPhone 4S
• The second semester with the woman i actually care about and love.
• iPhone 5
• Staying with my "other significant half" that we've been together with for more than two years - no entusiasm but i can count on her and it is not easy (or even wise) to move on, since we have lots of common friends and even my parents like her.  Oh and she is a great cook, even if the plates she uses are too small for schnitzels...

Back to the schnitzel, then.  In my humble personal opinion Apple screwed it real bad with the iPhone 5 design.  Sales were still stellar, but i have a hunch that things may change in the future months.  Of course it is not just the aesthetic perspective that counts, but on the OS side it also seems that some major changes in it's philosophy are required if it is to keep selling like crazy.  Moreover, if Apple wants people to keep paying premium money for the iPhone, then it should provide a premium experience compared to the competition.  With HTC One already here and reviewers raving about how great a phone it is, all i can advise is to enjoy your schnitzel while it lasts.  Maybe it shall be the last one you'll ever have on such a small plate...      

Size does matter

Size does matter.

I know, i know this is an honest to God stereotype. Yet there are many people who will support the exact opposite.  It is a big debate.  I know. (Note to self: This blog is about tech.)

But i am going to pose one simple question and i kindly ask the reader to sincerely answer: Assuming you pant size is M, would you wear an XXL pair everyday?

Having been someone really eager to become a badass hip-hopper in the (now long past) days of my youth, i can assure you that going from M to XXL(uhmm, pant size, that is) is a rather bold and  (if i may add) severely dysfunctional decision that even hardcore Eminem wannabes may eventually have to renounce.

So let me assume that most people would stick to their properly sized pants and get on with their lives without having to drag their feet or worrying that if they have to jog their pants will fall.

(Reality check: This is trying to become a tech blog.)

So, why should my M sized hands have to use an XXL cellphone from now until the getting bigger trend hopefully implodes into nothing, people? Why? Why should someone (an average Joe - not Shaquille Rashaun O' Neal, mind you) who is driving his (hopefully not both cheap and italian) car (assuming it is legal to talk & drive) should risk an accident while trying to answer his 5.5 inch cellphone for God's sake? Why should my cellphone block the sun of the whole city block when raised above my (rather big, yet proportionally tiny) head up in the air? Okay, i am now exaggerating but, have you ever used a 5 inch (or bigger) smartphone while also carrying the groceries and car keys and some leaflets that you were forced to accept, as well as dragging a crying toddler? What, no? Well, me neither, but you do get the meaning.

I must admit that i have used more than my fair share of gigantic smartphones (Dell Streak, Samsung Galaxy Note, ...) and even dumbphones (who remembers the behemoth of a phone - Ericsson R250s pro?).

So why am i whining again today? Well this question is rather complicated to answer right now, but i can think of at least one x-girlfirend who would boldly testify that i whine all the time. Anyway.  Let's move on.

I am complaining because if i want to buy a high end smartphone, chances are that it's going to have a 4.8 inch screen or larger, which simply is unacceptable.  As Sir Jonathan Ive was eager to point out when describing the iPhone 5 design, most people's fingers simply are not long enough to properly utilise so much screen real estate.  Then again there is a colleague of mine, who just bought a Galaxy Note 2 and it looks rather normal in his huge paws! But this guy is so tall and big that he may remain erect even if he faints sometime. You get the meaning, this person has huge hands and feet. Just like Mr. Lebron James in this Galaxy Note 2 commercial video.

Please allow me to now define the problem in good, old, plain English: Smartphones (especially high end ones) tend to be getting bigger and bigger, while having already crossed the rather distinct line between being practical and being marginally (un)usable for the average person and his medium sized hands. 

I can recall that more than a decade ago all cellphone manufacturers were trying to produce the smallest phone which was again leading to rather miserable products that actually tortured people.  Welcome to 2013: There are smartphones with 5.5 inch screens and for Christ's sake 5.8 and 6.3 (see Samsung Galaxy Mega - this sure is a proper name for such a Goliath of a "phone") inches are coming to some poor soul near you. Manufacturers now want to create the biggest phone. Yes they do.

Even Apple, in a half hearted attempt to catch up in this "mine is bigger than yours" competition thing was forced to move from the rather tired yet iconic and almost classic iPhone 4 chassis on to the twisted elongated ugliness of iPhone 5 (sorry Sir). In one swift move they went from a "you can't but love" to a "i desperately want to love but just can't" design. Yes. Even Apple who used to dictate our needs (note to self: dedicate another post to this one) and had almost got us convinced that 3.5 inches is ideal had to bite the bullet and increase the screen dimensions (or dimension, if we have to be specific).

Just to be fair though, the Galaxy Note series really define a new product category, the so called phablets and they just might justify their gargantuan existence mainly because of the stylus, which provides a new set of functionality characteristics that plain smartphones do not (and do not need to) feature. Still, dear reader, please do not make the mistake of thinking about them as phones. Because they are not, although they make phone calls.

All seems to be lost for us people with average size hands. Is all hope really gone? (This is completely irrelevant, but i cannot but recommend Guillermo del Toro's The strain trilogy - it creates such a doomed feeling that it (unexpectedly yet fittingly) came to my mind now that i am anticipating a dark future with 24 inch cellphones that we will be obliged to carry with us all the time...)

Are manufacturers forced to go to the XXL screen size because they simply cannot fit the quad core processors as well as the huge batteries required to feed them into a form size that actually CAN be operated one handedly?

I really cannot answer this, but i have a feeling that things will eventually get back to normal. Which by the way reminds me to point out the ideal smartphone size for "normal" people.  Ladies and gentlemen please welcome the HTC HD 2. Possibly best phone ever made. (Will certainly have to post smth exclusive about this überphone in the future). 

Screen size 4.3 inches. Phone chassis marginally bigger than the screen. That is the way to go people, and it has already been done in the end of 2009. Now that i get to think about it, what should the poor guy who scribbled "big" on the HD2's box be thinking about the current gen of high end smartphones?

When did her/his "big" become "small"? Dear Apple and Samsung please consider a new iPhone smth or Galaxy smth with the exact same dimensions of the HD2 and top notch hardware. Please be sensible and do as i ask.

Because size does matter.

We, averagely sized persons, would really love a high end smartphone in a practical form factor. One that we can proudly lift towards our face and talk without hiding behind it, one that we can text on with just one hand. There are billions of us out there. Is it too much to ask?

Smartwatch: Is it really a smart watch?

If I only had three wishes the 1^st one would be a decent smartwatch, the 2^ndone world peace and health to all mankind and the 3^rd one is more personal but you wouldn’t care (so please forget about it).

Right now though, world peace seems quite more probable than a really great smartwatch!.

Let me explain myself by providing a quick ancient history course first. The idea of a smartwatch has always been quite attractive to me. I have followed this particular market since 2005. 

My first one was the unforgettable Fossil Abacus (Fossil Abacus), which could very well be the ugliest watch ever. Uhmm scratch that, maybe the ugliest thing ever created/conceived by man. Period. Especially the brown strap was a monstrosity in itself. However there was a real Palm pda hidden in there, complete with an ingenious little stylus that showed real promise. The screen was an one incher (if I do remember correctly) grayscale and being actually able to operate this smartwatch required that:

1)      Your eyes were sharper than a hawk’s

2)      Your hand related motor skills were on par with that of a world renowned micro surgeon.

But still, it was a geek dream come true. And I think I even wore it twice. (No wonder I was looking for a girlfriend back then.) It wasn’t really useful though, mainly because of its small size, which was its unique selling point in the first place. Definition of dead end just provided. The notifications were hardly audible (thanks to the absolutely tiny speaker), provided you had superhero sensory abilities. Battery life was a little joke in itself. All in all, it may have been the true triumph of gadgetry over practicality and I even recall having installed an ebook reader and trying to read from it. Yes. I wanted to suffer.

So that was my first relationship with a smartwatch and I will never forget about it, but some years later (2009 I think) it was true love knocking at my door in the form of SonyEricsson MBW-150 (SE MBW-150).

This was a watch that you could actually wear and not be ashamed of interacting with grownups. Especially the music edition that I had purchased was looking really good, I might add. This was not a fully fledged PDA in itself, but rather an accessory of my smartphone. Thanks to a certain “smart mad” guy (Smartmadsoft) who provided drivers for almost every mobile OS, this proved to be a great buy. The battery life was acceptable at about 10 days and the tiny monochrome OLED screen was good. While it lasted that is. Because this watch had this particular bug. The OLED screen just dimmed to death by itself after some months, although lucky people with a fully working watch for more than one year have actually existed. All in all, it was a fairly priced actually useful gadget, again thanks to the community edition firmware that was developed. I will get back on this community thing later on. Don’t lose me here, it is important I think.

Next girlfriend, uhmmm smartwatch, was the Metawatch Strata (Metawatch Strata). This is where things started getting complex. Okay, I was quite an early adopter but this smartwatch showed some real promise for a long lasting relationship. But:

Initial FW was tragic in the ancient Greek way. I mean, really tragic. Random but extremely frequent disconnects from the phone rendered the watch completely useless. This was quickly resolved with a new FW though. The watch was quite good, battery life was maximized to maybe 14 days with the latest (current) FW, it was completely waterproof and actually worked. (This FW version also removed “the fish”! Dear God, who thought about this?) Vibration motor was a good thing, also. Why didn’t I keep it? Because I was unfortunate enough to have (and love) an iphone. On iOS your only way to connect to the watch is the official software (MWM – MetaWatch Manager) which is severely limited. If you jb the iphone some more functionality can be achieved but this is it.

But use the watch with an Android smartphone and the MWMCE (MetaWatch Manager Community Edition, that is) and a whole new world is revealed. Gone are all the problems/bugs of the MWM. All languages are presented, no more lag in CLI when receiving a call, even contact pictures appear (in glorious grayscale)! You can parametrize what you see on the watch to almost inhuman levels. You can even get rid of the absolutely frustrating four square screen layout. All in all, the Strata is light (though big and ugly), tough and provides proper battery life. But the screen is weird (lack of a better word here). It is advertised as a memory LCD display which means nothing  to me (and to most people I dare assume). The good: There is always one angle at which the screen is clearly visible no matter how bright the sun is. The bad: The angle is just one and most of the times it is not the angle at which you are used to looking at your watch. And now comes the ugly: The watch is severely handicapped when used with the official MWM, which is the only available option on an iPhone. My honest advise to Metawatch would be to try and utilize some of the community programmers of the Android scene and create smth close to MWMCE for iPhones (maybe only jailbroken ones, due to exclusive Apple imposed limitations). So the Strata seems that it was halfway there but just not actually there. This is why a friend with a Galaxy Note 2 is now using it.

Let here dully be noted that I would have bought a Pebble (Pebble) if there was one to buy, but come on people: Who wants to wait for six months in order to get one? Since it does nothing more than the Strata, to the best of my knowledge. Apart from the obvious hype, of course.  And okay it is infinitely more presentable / less embarrassing . One little comment here to Pebble’s PR people: Please do not confuse people into thinking they are getting an e-ink screen. Thank you.

Oh, the quest for true love never ends though… My current attempt/latest crush is the infamous i’m watch (i'm watch). Long story short, it’s Italian. While this statement should suffice for people who have bought Italian cars (not supercars that cost more than I will ever make until I am expected to die), let me explain for everyone else:

My current smartwatch a.k.a. i'm watch

It is sexy, as in truly good looking, although a bit on the heavy side. Okay that was an understatement, it is very heavy.  And the armband is too wide (40mm) and this can be annoying.  But let me recap, it is sexy. If your position in the corporate hierarchy is not in the upper tiers you might even want to be seen wearing this watch. This is a claim that has not been valid in my smartwatch relationships until the i’m watch arrived.

The screen is big, bright and OLED sexy. It also is curved, which makes it look even sleeker. As one sad, angry and confused reviewer (John Sciacca's opinion about i'm watch) has stated the company created so much fuss about the curved screen that would be appropriate if they had found the cure for cancer! Cannot say I disagree with him. However, I think this is something that has not been done before.  And it looks good. Italian design, you see.

Let’s continue with the good stuff. It has a color screen, 4 GBs of flash memory. It can play music, it has its own app market, you can even install other compatible (selecting from a real small list) apps via the sideload app which is available on the i’m market! It is a real standalone device that runs a custom Android 1.6 version that runs apps natively and is truly small. And good looking.

The bad stuff: The watch is slow, the scrolling is not perfect, memory is way too low, processor speed is just not enough.  A watch should be lightning fast, even more than a smartphone, since we are supposed to interact with a device that we are only used to just glance at. It is thick, it is heavy, it feels annoyingly big on the wrist.

The ugly stuff: For Christ’s sake this God damned thing has an inbuilt speaker, mic and 3,5 mm headphone jack! It supports phone calls through the watch via its terrible speakerphone/mic combination. Now, repeat after me: “I do not want to talk to my wrist. I am a grownup. I love Dick Tracy (and even Star Trek) but I still need to have friends and live a rather normal life”. This totally rules out walking on the street and talking to my wrist. Even if it worked properly (which is not the case), why would I want to do that? Moreover, it just does not work. The sound is terribly garbled and you simply cannot understand and be understood. The best (actually, worst) thing is that because of the speaker and mic and headphone hole, the watch is 100% not waterproof. Forget it on your wrist and walk/dance in the rain. Watch is dead. Forget it on your wrist and wash your hands. Watch is dead. Forget it on your wrist and sweat a lot. Watch is dead (which renders the imsport app completely useless for normal people who do sweat when they exercise). Battery life is a joke. A real bad one, indeed. With very moderate use, you might squeeze 20 hours out of it. Push it too hard and it will say bye-bye before you finish LOTR vol. one. Setting it up (provided that your phone supports tethering) is VERY complicated, even for a techhead with little to no life. Trust me.

The shameful stuff: If only i’m watch did not have a speaker/mic/headphone jack then it might have been 5 Atm waterproof, maybe thinner and lighter and hopefully with a bigger battery!!!

Bitter conclusion: Smartwatches up to this moment are either smart or watches. The i’m watch is really smart but not (at all) a watch, whereas the Casio GB-6900 (Casio BT watch) is 100% a watch (think about the 2 year battery life and 200m water resistance!) but not that smart, unfortunately. Still it is a candidate for my next tech affair.

Can Apple or Samsung or someone else manage to come up with a smartwatch that is both smart and also maintains the basic watch characteristics? Hopefully, yes. One real nice, yet ridiculously expensive device that I have used in the past and that could possibly lead to the right direction, is the LG GD910 watchphone (LG watchphone). This one was actually quite useful, could be used with a BT headset (unlike the i’m watch), was working great, it’s battery life was good, it had a very premium feel and was indeed beautiful. If I do remember correctly, the strap was a Tag Heuer design (made from carbon fibre)! And last but not least, it supported 3G video calls through it's tiny front facing camera. Gadget Heaven guaranteed.

So is there hope that a really decent smartwatch becomes a reality before humanity bores itself to death with Harlem Shake videos or an extinction level event (see here: huge meteorite impact/zombie apocalypse/some super-flu virus kills us all) takes place? Let us wait and see…

Until then, I think i have to keep searching for true smartwatch love.