An Apple Watch use case

Rob Richman, writing for Opinion8td:

Last year when I was in hospital for several months I relied on 3 devices that helped me through the days and nights. My iPad to watch Netflix, my iPhone for speaking/interacting with my family and friends as well as keeping up with what was happening in the world and surprisingly my Pebble. I’m surprised how important the Pebble was to me when I could hardly move and at times breathe while bedridden and almost immobile. The reason the Pebble was so useful to me was that my iPhone was often out of reach or at least difficult to reach without causing a lot of pain. Because for the most part my Pebble was always on my wrist I knew who was trying to contact me and if that notification looked important I could either try and summon the strength to reach out for my iPhone or ask a nurse to pass it to me when they came in.

This spoke volumes to me about one specific benefit of the smart watch: Efficiency/economy of movement. When Henry Ford was first figuring out how to implement his assembly line, he performed a series of time/motion studies, charting all of the individual motions a worker went through to perform a specific task, like mounting a tire or a door on the car. Ford reasoned that he could cut the labor cost by eliminating steps from the process, by finding ways to shave seconds off the amount of time it took to perform each task. Multiply one second saved by the number of parts in a car, and by the number of cars produced in a day, and you’ve accumulated some real cost savings.

This idea applies to the Apple Watch. If you can gain, essentially, the same information by tilting your wrist as you might by digging your phone out of your pocket, and avoid the cost of distraction that comes with pulling out your phone, that is a personal cost saving, and economy of movement.

I am now out of hospital and walking again and the Pebble still is a device I choose to wear. Yes I am a tech nerd, I have no fashion sense and in all honesty don’t care what people think of my appearance. For me function is for the most part more important than form. The Apple Watch is something I will be pre-ordering on April 10th not for style though I think all the models look gorgeous but because it offers more functionality and interaction than my trusted Pebble Watch with my iPhone.

It’s all about the ecosystem.

I’ll be sad to banish my Pebble in my drawer of old wires and adapters as it really has been a useful device for me. I will miss the long battery life but one annoyance I have about the Pebble is never knowing with any accuracy when it’s going to need charging.

That’s interesting. I wonder why Pebble does not put a battery monitor on screen. I don’t own one, so can’t address this, but I wonder if it is purely a hardware limitation. That’s a bit of a hamstring on Pebble’s one advantage, long battery life.

Update: Several Pebble owners pointed out that the Pebble does offer a battery indicator, just not necessarily on the watch face screen. No different than the Apple Watch. If you are interested, Rob added an update to his post clarifying his thoughts on this.