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cheap Chinese smart watch
Thursday, September 22 2016
As you know, I like gadgets, especially ones that remind of the computers I had as a teenager in the early years of the personal computer revolution. I especially like how every few years, a new form factor will emerge that, as it evolves, recapitulates the evolution of the personal computer. The first laptops had grainy monochrome screens and tiny hard drives. Then they got greyscale, color, and now they're as thin and light as a magazine and can no almost anything a desktop computer can. The first PDAs were similarly monochrome and limited, with the Palm Pilot starting out with roughly the capabilities of the first Macintosh. They eventually got color screens and big storage options, ultimately merging with phones to become a multi-purpose tile everyone is now expected to carry and consult. Now we're at the point where cheap one-board microcontrollers have the functionally of desktop computers from ten years ago. Even the simplest Arduino has a faster processor than a Mac II from 1987 (retail price $5500, in 1987 dollars), though its program space is more like that of a Commodore 64. The most recent form factor for generic computation is the smartwatch, typified by the iWatch. I don't really have a sense of what one would really do with a smart watch besides check the time (its ability to relay messages from a smartphone doesn't seem like a life-changer). Still, as a gadget that can assume any form of its size, who knows what application might be best suited for it? Hell, even a calculator watch is a fun gadget. Some time ago, I was looking on eBay for things like old-fashioned PDAs, calculator watches, and anything calling itself a smartwatch. In so doing, I discovered a whole world of cheap Chinese smartwatches costing anywhere between $8 and $40. They're obviously cruder than an Apple iWatch, but the fact that there are so many and they're so cheap suggests there is a lot of Chinese infrastructure installed to build them. Perhaps some of them are being made on the same assembly lines as iWatches; I've heard that shady manufacturers take over Chinese factories after hours and use the tooling and processes developed by prestige brands to build cheap knock-offs, some of which are not terrible. Because these cheap smartwatches are not beholden to the purity of Apple's vision, they actually incorporate some features that are absent from iWatches.
The other day I took delivery of a $15 smartwatch (from an American reseller) that included a 0.3 megapixel camera, and internal microSD and SIM slots, meaning it can function as a stand-alone smartphone (though it does not contain GPS electronics). The build quality is pretty bad (the touch sensor seems to be slightly-delaminated from the underlying display) and it's far from waterproof. But the screen is bright and clear (it's about 200 pixelse square) and the pre-installed apps actually work pretty reliably. But the camera is hard to use, since it points from a facet angled 45 degrees away from the screen, meaning you can never really see what you're taking a picture of. Good like trying to take a selfie (or, really, a picture of anything) with that. I have not yet played with the bluetooth functionality, which supposedly allows it to communicate with an Android phone. And it makes no sense to use its built-in MP3 player, since its speaker is tiny, I don't use bluetooth headphones, and it lacks an audio jack. But even if all I use it for is as a thumb drive, it's kind of worth having. Right now it contains a 32 gigabyte microSD card, giving me (should I wear the dorky thing) the storage of a circa-2000 desktop computer on my wrist.
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