iWatch - What is Possible?

Analysts and Apple fans have recently become enamored with the idea of an iWatch.  Bruce Tognazzini, a respected ex-Apple employee has an excellent blog post in which he describes all sorts of smart uses/features for such a watch.  As anticipation for such a device is building, so are the expectations for its features.  Some have come to see it as essentially an iPhone with a small screen.  I think those folks will be disappointed.  Think about it: we're talking about a device that needs to be thinner than an iPhone and, at most, 4 square inches in size.  There is no room for much of a battery!  Add to that the fact that, historically, people don't expect to have to recharge their watches every day, and you begin to see how impossible a "mini-iPhone" iWatch is.

So the features of an iWatch must revolve around power: how to minimize consumption and/or how to provide more of it without taking the watch off.

What can be done to keep power consumption to a minimum?  The two largest power hogs in a mobile device are its screen and the various radios driving communications (wifi, cellular, bluetooth).  Screen power consumption can be minimized by using a technology used in e-Readers (and in the recent "Pebble" smart watch): e-Ink.  With e-Ink, power is only needed when the screen needs to change.  But the technology, by its nature, has two drawbacks: slow refresh rates (making video impossible) and lack of color.  If Apple deems color and video playback indispensable, its option is OLED.  Reducing power on the various radios is easy: simply limit communication to one low-power channel.  I believe that is Bluetooth 4.0.  Of course, if the iWatch doesn't have wifi built in, it will not be a "connected" standalone device.  Apple's choice.

So, if the iWatch uses an e-Ink display and Bluetooth 4.0 for communication with an iPhone, what could such a device do?  Well, it could tell time! :-)  Also, like the Pebble, it could act as a remote display for all the phone's notifications.  For notifications requiring action, the watch's microphone could be used to tell Siri (located on the phone) what to do.  Similarly, the iWatch could display (or speak) results of any spoken Siri query.  The built-in speakers and microphone could also be used to make or answer phone calls (like today's Bluetooth headsets).  The bottom of the iWatch and/or the watchband could contain sensors that keep track of basic biometric info (e.g. pulse rate) - perhaps something similar to what Nike's Fuelband does - and send it to the phone occasionally (where an app can let you analyze the data over time).  Finally, an e-ink based iWatch could display OCR codes from Passbook.  When at a "favorite" store, the iWatch would automatically display the store's pass.  No need to fish for the phone or wallet!  Some analysts/users propose that the iWatch should have an NFC chip for payments.  I think this might be a future addition to the watch - there aren't enough (any?) NFC-based cash registers out there to warrant the additional complexity (and power drain) in the watch.  How long between charges?  Well, we have a couple examples that give us a clue: the Pebble smart watch lasts 7 days.  The Nike Fuelband is said to last 4 days.  So Apple, with its engineering prowess and deep R&D pockets, should be able to produce a watch that lasts at least as long as the Pebble.

If Apple wants to endow its watch with a color display and the ability to carry on FaceTime video conversations or watch Youtube videos, e-Ink is out of the question - an OLED display becomes necessary (it uses less power than LCD and can be put on a flexible substrate to allow for a curved display).  If the watch has a built-in accelerometer, intelligent power management software could turn off the display whenever its wearers' arm is hanging by his/her side and gets activated only by the touch of a finger or by an incoming notification.  Perhaps, this way, the iWatch could still last 5-7 days between charges.

But no matter how hard Apple tries, an iWatch will have to be charged on at least a weekly basis.  What can Apple do to make this as painless as possible?  Some manufacturers have begun offering wireless charging pads (and Apple owns a patent on doing this over the distance of up to 1 meter) that might be useful here.  If one didn't have to plug in yet another device and, instead, simply placed the watch, along with ones iPhone, on such a pad for charging at night, people might not mind!  Heck, if they can pull off that feat, maybe an iWatch only really needs to last as long as the partner iPhone!

Samsung Galaxy SII and Ice Cream Sandwich

I gave up my iPhone 3GS last year for a Samsung Galaxy SII last year.  I previously described my experiences on my blog and am providing this update because I had high hopes that the new Android release (Ice Cream Sandwich - ICS) would help alleviate my main issue with with the Samsung Galaxy SII: it's horrible battery life.

After waiting months for AT&T and Samsung to make this release of Android available, it finally happened a week ago.  Although the upgrade was not available over-the-air, it was a relatively painless affair to do so via the desktop and Samsung's otherwise horrible Kies desktop software.  Other than losing all my direct-dial shortcuts and app icons from my home screens, everything seemed to have been preserved.  Has it been an improvement over the existing Android release?  I guess so - but not in huge ways.  There are still the duplicate/redundant applications (e.g. mail & gmail; AT&T Navigation & Google Navigation); some apps have different but not perceivably better layouts/menus (e.g. Google maps); many apps still don't use the standard Android "Menu" button (e.g. Words-with-Friends).

Did it improve my phone's horrendous battery life?  Not initially.  But I didn't expect it to happen on its own.  But I knew that ICS sported a new feature: the ability to "disable" some of the built-in apps.  So that's what I did.  Below is a list of the apps I disabled so far (via Settings->Applications->"All"):

• Accuweather Weather Daemon
• Accuweather.com
• AT&T Navigator
• Buddies Now
• City ID
• Exchange Services
• Face Unlock
• Home Screen Tips
• Media Hub
• MusicFX
• News & Weather
• Remote Controls
• Social Hub (two entries??)
• Swype
• Talk
• Yahoo!Finance

Some of these might be apps I installed, but most are built-in processes.  There are many other processes listed under "All", but since there's really no way of knowing which of these services are required for Android to function properly and which are optional, I had to guess.  If you know of more apps that can be deleted, please let me know and I'll add them to this list.

After disabling these apps, I also went to Settings->Accounts and sync and turned off auto-sync (on my phone the list of apps under this heading consisted of only two: Facebook and Google)...I have no idea what this menu actually does - even with it turned off, I still get notifications of mail arriving in my Google mail account - but I don't appear to be betting Facebook notifications.

After these changes, I tested the battery by no longer turning off wifi whenever I wasn't at a wifi location.  Lo and behold, my battery still lasted all day (well, it did go into the red once at 10:30pm, so it obviously still depends on where I move throughout the day)!  So I'm a bit more likely to keep my Galaxy S2 for the term of my contract (I was ready to give up on it already).

I may still eat the AT&T penalty and get the iPhone 5 when it comes out - because iOS is just more intuitive/consistent across all the applications (Apple's toolkits, style- and approval-guidelines are just more strict than Android's, I guess) and, most importantly, Apple, unlike Google, doesn't have to wait for the telecoms to make its system upgrades/improvements available to its phone customers and Apple doesn't allow those same companies to preload the phones with bloatware that can cause the slow-downs/resource drain my Galaxy obviously suffered from.  I will decide once I know how much better the iPhone 5 hardware is from the iPhone 4s.