HP Titan JUXT Smartwatch
- A smartwatch that’s also a smart-looking watch
- Force Touch touchscreen? Not on your watch
- OLED screen for notifications
- Model: P1L46AA, N3U45AA (each a jumble of angular numbers and letters offset by one or two softly curved characters mid-sequence. The result is frightening, yet beautiful, like a Twombly canvas)
JUXT in Time
What’s a smartwatch supposed to be? On the one hand, it might be a device of pure, paradigm-shattering novelty, heralding a whole new way of life. On the other hand, it might essentially be just a watch, albeit one that can do some cool extra stuff. Now you are wearing watches on both hands. You look ridiculous.
People who see it the first way probably want their smartwatches built by the likes of a Google, or Apple, or some other team of forward-looking geniuses in thousand-dollar hoodies. For those of us in the second camp, it makes more sense to entrust a proven maker of watches, and let them outsource any necessary new software to a capable contractor.
Titan’s Juxt arises from this latter category. Availing itself of HP’s “Engineered by HP” partnership program, the Indian watchmaker with a reputation for “extremely reliable watches” is able to offer a wristwatch with some basic smarts (text, email, and social media notifications, mainly) without investing years of R&D, or needing to swerve far outside their lane.
(The quotation above about extreme reliability is from the head of HP’s wearables group Sridhar Solur. Read it in context here at The Verge. And while you’re clicking links to outside opiners about this watch, check this one. Kunal Dua of Gadgets360 says “the Titan Juxt looks like a regular watch and nothing at all like the smartwatches out there, which is good, since that is exactly what Titan set out to do.” )
So these watches that resulted… look like watches. Which, yeah, if you conceive of the smartwatch in this way (as a watch with a few new capabilities), they damned well ought to. For most of us with a tepid-ish interest in trying out “wearable technology”, that’s the style with which we were always going to be most comfortable.
For others, such an old-fashioned aesthetic – and the insufficiently radical mindset it connotes – seems like contemptible half measures from fearful oafs unable to engage with our changing world.
We support those folks’ right to strap their wrists into something more instantly recognizable as belonging to a new and impending future. Let theirs be as different from a traditional watch as the Concorde was from Sharovipteryx. For them, the revolutionary look of an Apple Watch (for example) is an important part of what the watch itself means. It announces to the world that the old ways are dying, and wearers of such exotic hardware are already living in accordance with new ones.
Bless ‘em, though; it sure costs a lot more to make bold statements like that.
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