Curious about how a smart watch might fit into my life, I picked up a Pebble on eBay right before heading out to WordCamp PHX. It was surprisingly useful in a few different situations:
- When hanging out chatting with people, it was a lot easier to glance at my wrist to see if that buzz was a text message I needed to respond to (perhaps to coordinate where to meet, etc.) vs. a tweet, etc. that I could safely ignore until later. Not taking my phone out of my pocket for each buzz seemed more polite and made me more present.
- Having the buzz happen on my wrist caused me to catch a few more alerts as well. When I’m not wearing jeans, it miss my phone buzzing more often than I’d like. I used to use a belt-clipped holster like I did in my BlackBerry days to avoid this, but gave it up a few years ago.
- Being able to glance down at the weather was a nice alternative to pulling out my phone, navigating to the weather app, and waiting for it to load.
I’m not wearing it as a daily watch; I have a traditional watch that I prefer. But I do think I will bring out the Pebble for situations where I’m likely to be involved in a lot of communication.
Interesting. Since Samsung announced theirs, I’ve been trying to figure out what the heck I’d actually do with a smart watch. I hadn’t thought of the difference in noticing a buzz on the wrist vs a buzz in the pocket, but I can certainly see that being useful.
As far as using it to filter incoming notices, I’ve just pared down the types of notices that actually fire off a bleep/buzz. I don’t use SMS notices from social networks (since I’ve got the app on the phone anyway), and I’ve turned off sound on everything except for texts, calls, work email, and Skype. It works pretty well for me, but that’s obviously going to depend on the breakdown of your incoming messages. If there’s a lot of chatter on work email, or if texts mix lots of critical and lots of easily-deferred items, it’s not going to be effective.
[…] easy to miss calls or even texts when you’re out on the floor of the convention. It’s easier to notice a buzz on your wrist than a buzz in your pocket, and less intrusive to glance at your wrist to see if it’s […]