About Smartwatches

A smartwatch is a wrist-watch that can do more than telling the time or measuring time. I would count such early attempts as memory watches or calculator watches as smartwatches.

Current smartwatches either are complete smartphones or connect to a smartphone via Bluetooth. The Burg smartwatch is a complete smartphone, the Sony Smartwatch is of the latter type.

It's easier to describe a watch that is a complete smartphone, than a watch that connects to a smartphone. Let's look at the latter.

First of all, the Sony Smartwatch can't make calls! However you can read your SMS, Email and calendar on it. You can follow Twitter and Facebook and you can reject a call and send a predefined SMS. This is not the type of device Michael Knight in the famous TV-series used. It's only a limited user interface for your phone. In one sense it is really a smartwatch: it looks smart! The new Sony Smartwatch2 is slightly improved. It has a 1.6" screen with 220 x 176 pixels, but not much else.

The Pebble E-Paper Watch can connect via Bluetooth to iPhone and Android smartphones. It got its name from having an e-paper screen. It contains a GPS receiver. Unconnected it can show a speedometer and an odometer, and it can record your route. Later when you connect to your smartphone, you can see the route on a map. The Pebble is similar to what the Sony Smartwatch should have been, if you ask me.

To a smartwatch designer I would say the following. The wrist-watch is now an old concept. Customers are very familiar with it, so more than half the marketing is for free. Do something with the fact that it's worn close to the body, it's worn mostly on the pulse, has its own bracelet, can always be with you without being held i.e. occupying one of the hands, can be made water-proof, can be attractively designed, that women wear clothes without pockets, can have more than just a screen. This means it can benefit from having a built-in GPS, a heartrate monitor, a phone. Remember James Bond. What would Q have done?

By the way, Proctele's SmarterNote app has been updated again. The new version is v1.4. See all Proctele apps at http://proctele.se

Updated Apps

Two Proctele apps have been updated recently. The new versions will be for sale within a week. The updated apps are:

• SmarterNote
• SMS-Fast

Both updates add a bit of functionality.

TCompanion's new price $1

The newly updated app TCompanion What Direction is ...? now has a new lower price, which is $1.

TCompanion uses GPS and compass to show you what direction you should take to get to some place you marked. Your iPhone knows where you are, and you tell it where you would rather be. TCompanion shows you an arrow, which shows what direction to take, until you're there.

TCompanion is for pedestrians or cyclists, for whom conventional GPS-devices are suboptimal to put it politely.

Updated Apps

These two Proctele Apps have been updated:

• SmarterNote
• TCompanion - What direction is ...?

The latter has been renamed slightly. It also has a new icon in bright colors. 

Here it is:

SmarterNote got a bugfix. It also behaves better when a note contains several pictures.

If you're missing something in either of these apps, please let us know by sending an email to admin [at] proctele.se.

App Store is 5 years old

Apple's App Store celebrated its 5th birthday yesterday July 10th. In total about 50 billion apps have been downloaded and there are now about 900,000 iOS apps available. The Google Play, which is the Android counter-part contains about 800,000 apps. The app industry is predicted to out-size the music industry quite soon.

The revenue that Apple has paid out to developers in the first 5 years is $10 billion. App Store revenues are about 3 times those of Google Play, indicating Android users are less willing to pay for apps. I'll come back to that here below.

Before iPhone and App Store there used to be feature phones. Those could usually download so-called Java apps. Many if not most of those were for free. They were available from different sites. Downloading usually worked, but the downloading experience was un-perfect to say the least. You might pay for an app that didn't actually run on your device. Also the screens displaying the apps were way too small. I suspect most users never bothered to download any apps at all and therefore made do with the phone as they bought it.

I'm not surprised Android app revenues are still low, because I haven't met a lot of people who pay for their Android apps. How come? My hypothesis is that Android devices are sold at all sorts of price levels, and the top-selling devices are the cheap ones. I would guess that Samsung S3 devices generate more app revenues than the rock-bottom devices. If you instead of a Samsung S3 buy a very cheap device you may not want to spend any money on apps, because cost is top priority. Never mind that the app's price is a fraction of the price of a cup of coffee, the phone will not be allowed to cost more than you already paid for it. Well except for the odd accessories like a display shield, headset, case, stylus, etc. iPhone owners seem to differ in that respect. They've bought the best and most expensive device and they're willing to top it up with both accessories and apps. 

iOS7 new features

iOS7 was presented yesterday (June 10) and will be released this fall. I'm going to point out my favorites of the new features.

The new Control Center feature means now some functions are directly accessible by sweeping from the bottom of the screen. Turn on or off Airplane mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Do Not Disturb are all available that way, but so are some functions you tend to need regularly and quickly, like flashlight, timer, calculator and camera.

There's one great Control Center feature I would have liked to see: sweep access to the settings of the current app. I hope someone at Apple reads this.

Notification Center access from the Lock screen. Very useful!

Real multi-tasking. This is a feature that Android has had for a long while. I think Apple waited to add this feature until they solved the battery draining problem that multi-tasking usually brings. I guess Apple's approach could be called smart multi-tasking.

AirDrop for iOS is great. Proctele can't wait to include that in some of its apps.

iOS Safari's new tab view is so beautiful I've got to put a picture of it right here:

It's like you're looking into a drawer and seeing pages of paper standing up, is it cardboard ;-)? Beautiful!

App Store app automatically updates your app with the newest app versions. Good!

iOS devices are among the most popular devices in the world and thieves know that. The existing Find my iPhone app counters that problem. A new feature is that turning off Find My iPhone or erasing your device requires your Apple ID and password. To reactivate the device your Apple ID and password are required.

And lastly. The icons have been redesigned. See them here. iOS7 looks good.

Google Reader expiry and Windows 8.1

Google Reader is about to expire. The sad date is July 1st.

Google Reader has been in operation since 2005. It is a so-called content aggregator. With it you can find feeds and subscribe to feeds, manage feeds and read them, and Google Reader tells you if there's new content in your subscribed feeds. This is a great service. Professionals have used Google Reader to stay informed about their fields of expertise.

Google has been warning about the expiry since the expiry announcement in March this year. Google Takeout let me export my Google Reader user data. Google insists that my user data belongs to me and I couldn't agree more. So what do you do when your favorite service is taken away? Look for replacement of course. I found Feedly in Chrome Store. It looks promising, definitely better looks than Google Reader whose user interface Google hasn't updated for several years.

A few words about Windows 8.1 the soon to be announced Windows version. Rumors have it that Microsoft are fearing that Windows 8.0 may have been too big a step from Windows 7. The previous Windows version looked much like an evolved Windows XP, so most users instantly felt comfortable with it. But Windows 8.0 started with a fresh slate, and that's not a Microsofty way of evolving. Of course something as different as Windows 8.0 is exciting and fresh, but probably scared a few IT managers. With Windows 8.1 Microsoft is reacting to bad sales (only about 100 million ;-) ) and reversing to some degree.

A more conservative way of introducing a touch-friendly user interface would have been to keep the Windows 7 interface (with start-button and all, but slightly evolved) and to make the touch-interface available at the press of a toggle button. This would have enabled desktop and laptop user to get used to the new interface without having to take the big plunge. What's more, the IT managers would have been kept secure and happy. I look forward to the release.