What a foolish endeavor in the first place. The landscape is littered with the carcasses of companies (witness the fodder for the Meh buyers) that dedicated their existence to watches. But Somehow Verizon thought they could do it?
They must have rushed the product approval through while their notoriously tight-ass Finance folks were on vacation.
@djslack The watch was manufactured by Quanta, though it’s unclear if they did the development for VZ, or were simply the manufacturing resource.
@RedOak, LG bagged their first LTE watch project, coming out with a 2nd gen without even releasing the first gen into the wild. I don’t know anything about the background, but LG had an agreement with VZ to push the 1st gen LTE watch. I wonder if VZ pulled support which would have caused the demise. 2nd gen LTE is a AT&T model, so perhaps that’s a clue what happened to the first.
Smart watches are on the cusp of something grand, but IMHO not quite there yet. They are useful tools right now, but not yet a direction forging tech factor. Yet. I think they’ll be there within 2 years. To reach that level they need total autonomy, 3 day battery and a better sound interface. And of course the UI is always going to be a challenge, but in my limited use of the ZenWatch 2’s old tech combined with AW 2.0, Google speech recognition is quite usable, so the tiny keyboard interface becomes less an issue.
@ruouttaurmind agreed. I would not have considered an Apple Watch previously. But the level of health and exercise integration + other app functionality with the latest OS looks like it’s getting close… assuming the discounts on it keep showing up.
@ruouttaurmind I knew if I just spouted my ideas someone knowledgeable would bring more facts and I could learn without having sat down and googled for myself Thanks.
@ruouttaurmind does this smart watch of yours do anything at all without you having your phone at hand? (if your answer is “well, it would tell time”, that does not much differentiate it from a “dumb” watch.)
does it do anything that your phone does not?
does it do anything better on its tiny screen than your phone does on its much larger screen?
or is it effectively a small remote screen for your phone?
(assuming the distance of a few fee is “remote”)
I believe what you have there is a fancy toy/prestige piece.
@ekw you sound like the entrenched masses who piled on Apple, “you can’t leave out that physical keyboard - only halfwits would want a phone with only a touchscreen”.
I used to believe smartwatches were only for geeks, but the latest versions are actually getting very close to useful - as an example with the latest levels of health and exercise integration with the phone.
@ekw Well then, never having owned a cell phone - smart or not - perhaps your mobile phone/smart watch-specific advice would be of limited value to those who’ve at least experienced the value of texting.
does this smart watch of yours do anything at all without you having your phone at hand?
Well, it would tell time. Oh, and the current weather and weather forecast. Right, and I guess it does that calendar/agenda/reminders bit. And email. It’ll autonomously send and retrieve my email. And Google searches, Google Maps and driving directions. Stream music to it’s built-in speaker. There are hundreds of apps in the Google Play Store which live and run completely within the watch and most will operate autonomously.
I truly intend no disrespect or insult… but I wonder if you have an understanding of the capabilities of a modern smart watch, or if your opinion is based on scuttlebutt and assumptions?
My particular watch, the 2 year old Asus ZenWatch 2 (antique by tech standards), has 4gb of internal storage, 512mb RAM. And, in addition to Bluetooth it has WiFi. As long as it’s in range of a WiFi AP, I can turn my phone off and the watch will continue to do all those things I listed, plus more. The only things it won’t do autonomously, really, is notify me of incoming phone calls and texts. I didn’t even touch on the fitness tracking capabilities.
Many of the limitations I mentioned challenging my 2 year old dinosaur have been addressed in the model OP linked above, by adding LTE data capability to the watch. Now it can do it’s thing without even being in range of a WiFi AP.
So…
does this smart watch of yours do anything at all without you having your phone at hand?
In summary, yes. Quite a bit actually.
But only a halfwit wouldn’t already have known that before coming along and dropping dispersions and generalizations.
@ruouttaurmind so, are you telling me that a hypothetical person (in this case named “me”) who did not own a cellphone of any type, could purchase a watch much like yours and enjoy all these wonderful things?
as in - do they have watches with their own wireless (that may be the wrong term) plans, or is this piggybacking off of your phone’s plan?
so, I could be driving down the road in my car with just this watch and get driving directions, even though there is nothing for it to connect to via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi ?
I’m hard pressed to guess how music playing from a watch might sound, but we’ll leave my biases on that subject out of the discussion for now.
I’m hard pressed to guess how music playing from a watch might sound, but we’ll leave my biases on that subject out of the discussion for now.
I have no doubt the internal speaker is less than audiophile quality.
so, are you telling me that a hypothetical person (in this case named “me”) who did not own a cellphone of any type, could purchase a watch much like yours and enjoy all these wonderful things?
Technically, yes, realistically, not really. But caveats exist…
The initial setup, activation and configuration of the watch relied on the phone-resident app. Once fully configured though, so long as my watch has access to wifi, it will continue to provide the functionality I listed in the third paragraph of my response above.
To be clear, my response mentioned two different watches. The watch I own, the older tech ZenWatch 2. I also mention the Verizon Watch24 initially mentioned in the OP.
My watch relies on wifi to do it’s thing, but it can do it’s thing while connected to any wifi AP. I can leave my phone at home, come to work, and once in the building my watch will connect to my office wifi network and will continue to check my email for example.
The Verizon Watch24 mentioned by the OP has it’s own LTE data radio, just like a cell phone does. It doesn’t need any wifi or connection to a cell phone to continue doing it’s thing. It uses it’s own internal radio to communicate with cellular towers. Plus, it adds the ability to sent/receive SMS messages which mine cannot do without the phone in range.
as in - do they have watches with their own wireless (that may be the wrong term) plans, or is this piggybacking off of your phone’s plan?
Well, frankly, I’m unprepared to answer that. That’s a matter of business model for each cellular service provider. I can speculate, however, that individual data plans are available, based solely on my experience with my cellular radio equipped tablet. Although I no longer carry the service, I previously had a data service through T-Mobile which was independent of any cellular phone service. But again, that’s a matter of how a particular provider designates their business model.
@ruouttaurmind that is interesting.
thank you, by the way, for your reasoned, and well explained response, and the time you took to convey it to me.
I had been thinking of watches as being similar to my (wifi only) samsung tablet, which works great in the house and at (say) a hotel, but on the road in between is fairly useless (for say mapping/directions).
as a (grumpy) old fart, I could not thinking about your watch’s 4GB storage and recalling specc’ing desktop PCs (in the early 1990’s) for a project office and deciding that the 212MB hard drive was in the sweet spot of the $/MB curve.
@ruouttaurmind my first PC cost about $2100 total
it was a 286/12 with 1MB RAM (upgraded from 512KB!) and had a 40MB hard drive (I think, it was December 1989, so it’s hard to be sure!).
it had an EGA video card & monitor.
the mouse & software was a $50 add-on.
that price includes the 9 pin printer which was separate.
386 class machines were out, but were ~$3500.
386SX somewhere around 3000.
when I started my current job (Jan, 1999) our database was stored on a MASSCAB (sp?) which was an array of twenty 1GB HDDs.
it’s been an interesting 30 years since I got out of college!.
@ekw my Samsung gear S2 watch (which I own because it was free) can optionally have its own wireless plan. Initially I misread the directions about activating it and transferred my cell number to it. The ideal plan from the wireless provider’s perspective is for me to pay an extra $5/mo to them to have cell service to my watch as well, but I didn’t decide that was necessary. I had to call customer service Dick Tracy style to get my number switched back to my phone.
It can do quite a few things standalone but is better paired with a phone. If I had the cell service for my watch I could also leave my phone in the car, locker at the gym, etc and still get and make calls and texts just from the watch. And this is a 2 year old model now, so newer units could possibly do more.
@ruouttaurmind damn! I’m not sure my first PC had a 3.5" drive. I’m thinking it did not.
probably would have cost another $100, lol.
I also remember being in college & one of my buddies showed me a CD copy of Rush’s Exit Stage Left that his brother (who worked for HP) made at work.
never did I imagine (at the time) that the $1,000+ cd burner would end up costing less than a case of beer.
@ekw Oh, yes. The ubiquitous HP CD burner. I was working for Siemens Corporation when the burners were starting to become prolific. There was one in the data processing centre and I’d skulk in at 2am to copy CDs. I don’t recall the exact cost of media… maybe a few bucks each… but I do remember it seemed like a pile of dosh back then, so it was painful when the write process aborted with a buffer overflow error and I’d wind up with an expensive, silver frisbee.
@ruouttaurmind oh yes. but those burners where unknown at a consumer level for a while.
perhaps you remember the tales we were told when music CDs first hit the stores -
the price was high (~$15) due to the enormous fail rate in the burning process (perhaps the blanks were unreliable?).
once that got sorted prices were sure to come down to around the $10 mark.
yeah. or, they’d just add it to the profit margin.
@djslack I’ll take your word for it on burning/pressing. I don’t know how they make the retail ones.
but there was something in the manufacturing process that was causing a very high fail rate.
faulty media or something.
@ekw TIL the smart watch does a lot without a phone. I left my phone at home today and didn’t realize until I got to work. My watch connected to WiFi and I could receive texts and respond by voice. I missed a call and my watch let me know. Unsure if it didn’t ring or if it was one of those weird calls that go straight to missed call status.
@djslack I would have to say I am impressed as well.
as you might have guessed from my dickish first post, I had thought these could barely tell time w/o their “married” cell phone within reach.
now I’m just another grumpy old fart, complaining about stuff he doesn’t understand!
The tricks that emerging technologies can perform might boggle one’s sense of future shock frequently. So-called “smartwatches” kinda fall in this area.
Then the big new tech settles down and get a bit boring. And something else gets interesting.
Incidentally, if you want maps on your wrist, Garmin makes some “connected watches” and some non-connected watches with visual maps.
These can be useful for sports and the like, if you don’t have a handheld hiking or biking gps on you.
The screen is way too small to be useful for driving.
I’ll buy it for $5.
@RiotDemon I wouldn’t.
@simssj Not even with free shipping?
@sligett Nope. Not a chance.
@RiotDemon I truthfully wouldn’t even pay that. Maybe two for Tuesday at a dollar apeice.
Verizon has a watch? Who knew?
What a foolish endeavor in the first place. The landscape is littered with the carcasses of companies (witness the fodder for the Meh buyers) that dedicated their existence to watches. But Somehow Verizon thought they could do it?
They must have rushed the product approval through while their notoriously tight-ass Finance folks were on vacation.
@RedOak Surely they slapped their name on some other OEM’s product and didn’t actually develop their own watch.
@djslack no less foolish.
@djslack The watch was manufactured by Quanta, though it’s unclear if they did the development for VZ, or were simply the manufacturing resource.
@RedOak, LG bagged their first LTE watch project, coming out with a 2nd gen without even releasing the first gen into the wild. I don’t know anything about the background, but LG had an agreement with VZ to push the 1st gen LTE watch. I wonder if VZ pulled support which would have caused the demise. 2nd gen LTE is a AT&T model, so perhaps that’s a clue what happened to the first.
Smart watches are on the cusp of something grand, but IMHO not quite there yet. They are useful tools right now, but not yet a direction forging tech factor. Yet. I think they’ll be there within 2 years. To reach that level they need total autonomy, 3 day battery and a better sound interface. And of course the UI is always going to be a challenge, but in my limited use of the ZenWatch 2’s old tech combined with AW 2.0, Google speech recognition is quite usable, so the tiny keyboard interface becomes less an issue.
@ruouttaurmind agreed. I would not have considered an Apple Watch previously. But the level of health and exercise integration + other app functionality with the latest OS looks like it’s getting close… assuming the discounts on it keep showing up.
@ruouttaurmind I knew if I just spouted my ideas someone knowledgeable would bring more facts and I could learn without having sat down and googled for myself
Thanks.
@djslack I’m at an advantage only because I’ve been extensively researching this subject (smart watches) over the last month or so.
I’d buy that for a dollar!
@PocketBrain
/giphy I’d buy that for a dollar
smartwatches are definitely a product that has halfwits as its target market.
@ekw “Good to know” says @ruouttaurmind, quickly glancing at his smart watch to see if he has time for this shit.
“Perhaps you can flesh out your assertion?” he asks.
@ekw Heeeey I resemble that remark
@ruouttaurmind does this smart watch of yours do anything at all without you having your phone at hand? (if your answer is “well, it would tell time”, that does not much differentiate it from a “dumb” watch.)
does it do anything that your phone does not?
does it do anything better on its tiny screen than your phone does on its much larger screen?
or is it effectively a small remote screen for your phone?
(assuming the distance of a few fee is “remote”)
I believe what you have there is a fancy toy/prestige piece.
@ekw you sound like the entrenched masses who piled on Apple, “you can’t leave out that physical keyboard - only halfwits would want a phone with only a touchscreen”.
I used to believe smartwatches were only for geeks, but the latest versions are actually getting very close to useful - as an example with the latest levels of health and exercise integration with the phone.
@RedOak no, you have the wrong guy.
I’m the guy who has never owned a cell phone.
So I never really cared if they had keyboards or not.
Are you saying that the new versions are almost as good as a 5 year old Fitbit, as long as you are also carrying your phone?
@ekw Well then, never having owned a cell phone - smart or not - perhaps your mobile phone/smart watch-specific advice would be of limited value to those who’ve at least experienced the value of texting.
@ekw
Well, it would tell time. Oh, and the current weather and weather forecast. Right, and I guess it does that calendar/agenda/reminders bit. And email. It’ll autonomously send and retrieve my email. And Google searches, Google Maps and driving directions. Stream music to it’s built-in speaker. There are hundreds of apps in the Google Play Store which live and run completely within the watch and most will operate autonomously.
I truly intend no disrespect or insult… but I wonder if you have an understanding of the capabilities of a modern smart watch, or if your opinion is based on scuttlebutt and assumptions?
My particular watch, the 2 year old Asus ZenWatch 2 (antique by tech standards), has 4gb of internal storage, 512mb RAM. And, in addition to Bluetooth it has WiFi. As long as it’s in range of a WiFi AP, I can turn my phone off and the watch will continue to do all those things I listed, plus more. The only things it won’t do autonomously, really, is notify me of incoming phone calls and texts. I didn’t even touch on the fitness tracking capabilities.
Many of the limitations I mentioned challenging my 2 year old dinosaur have been addressed in the model OP linked above, by adding LTE data capability to the watch. Now it can do it’s thing without even being in range of a WiFi AP.
So…
In summary, yes. Quite a bit actually.
But only a halfwit wouldn’t already have known that before coming along and dropping dispersions and generalizations.
@ruouttaurmind so, are you telling me that a hypothetical person (in this case named “me”) who did not own a cellphone of any type, could purchase a watch much like yours and enjoy all these wonderful things?
as in - do they have watches with their own wireless (that may be the wrong term) plans, or is this piggybacking off of your phone’s plan?
so, I could be driving down the road in my car with just this watch and get driving directions, even though there is nothing for it to connect to via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi ?
I’m hard pressed to guess how music playing from a watch might sound, but we’ll leave my biases on that subject out of the discussion for now.
@RedOak there’s a value to texting?
do go on!
@ekw
I have no doubt the internal speaker is less than audiophile quality.
Technically, yes, realistically, not really. But caveats exist…
The initial setup, activation and configuration of the watch relied on the phone-resident app. Once fully configured though, so long as my watch has access to wifi, it will continue to provide the functionality I listed in the third paragraph of my response above.
To be clear, my response mentioned two different watches. The watch I own, the older tech ZenWatch 2. I also mention the Verizon Watch24 initially mentioned in the OP.
My watch relies on wifi to do it’s thing, but it can do it’s thing while connected to any wifi AP. I can leave my phone at home, come to work, and once in the building my watch will connect to my office wifi network and will continue to check my email for example.
The Verizon Watch24 mentioned by the OP has it’s own LTE data radio, just like a cell phone does. It doesn’t need any wifi or connection to a cell phone to continue doing it’s thing. It uses it’s own internal radio to communicate with cellular towers. Plus, it adds the ability to sent/receive SMS messages which mine cannot do without the phone in range.
Well, frankly, I’m unprepared to answer that. That’s a matter of business model for each cellular service provider. I can speculate, however, that individual data plans are available, based solely on my experience with my cellular radio equipped tablet. Although I no longer carry the service, I previously had a data service through T-Mobile which was independent of any cellular phone service. But again, that’s a matter of how a particular provider designates their business model.
@ruouttaurmind that is interesting.
thank you, by the way, for your reasoned, and well explained response, and the time you took to convey it to me.
I had been thinking of watches as being similar to my (wifi only) samsung tablet, which works great in the house and at (say) a hotel, but on the road in between is fairly useless (for say mapping/directions).
as a (grumpy) old fart, I could not thinking about your watch’s 4GB storage and recalling specc’ing desktop PCs (in the early 1990’s) for a project office and deciding that the 212MB hard drive was in the sweet spot of the $/MB curve.
@ekw I still recall paying $900 for my first 100MB HDD and thinking I was after havin’ a bargain. SMH!
@ruouttaurmind my first PC cost about $2100 total
it was a 286/12 with 1MB RAM (upgraded from 512KB!) and had a 40MB hard drive (I think, it was December 1989, so it’s hard to be sure!).
it had an EGA video card & monitor.
the mouse & software was a $50 add-on.
that price includes the 9 pin printer which was separate.
386 class machines were out, but were ~$3500.
386SX somewhere around 3000.
when I started my current job (Jan, 1999) our database was stored on a MASSCAB (sp?) which was an array of twenty 1GB HDDs.
it’s been an interesting 30 years since I got out of college!.
@ekw Oi. Waxing sentimental. LOL!
My first PC was a IBM PS/2 Model 30. 8086, 640K RAM, 20MB HDD and that ground breaking 3.5", 720K FDD! HA!
@ekw my Samsung gear S2 watch (which I own because it was free) can optionally have its own wireless plan. Initially I misread the directions about activating it and transferred my cell number to it. The ideal plan from the wireless provider’s perspective is for me to pay an extra $5/mo to them to have cell service to my watch as well, but I didn’t decide that was necessary. I had to call customer service Dick Tracy style to get my number switched back to my phone.
It can do quite a few things standalone but is better paired with a phone. If I had the cell service for my watch I could also leave my phone in the car, locker at the gym, etc and still get and make calls and texts just from the watch. And this is a 2 year old model now, so newer units could possibly do more.
@ruouttaurmind damn! I’m not sure my first PC had a 3.5" drive. I’m thinking it did not.
probably would have cost another $100, lol.
I also remember being in college & one of my buddies showed me a CD copy of Rush’s Exit Stage Left that his brother (who worked for HP) made at work.
never did I imagine (at the time) that the $1,000+ cd burner would end up costing less than a case of beer.
@ekw Oh, yes. The ubiquitous HP CD burner. I was working for Siemens Corporation when the burners were starting to become prolific. There was one in the data processing centre and I’d skulk in at 2am to copy CDs. I don’t recall the exact cost of media… maybe a few bucks each… but I do remember it seemed like a pile of dosh back then, so it was painful when the write process aborted with a buffer overflow error and I’d wind up with an expensive, silver frisbee.
The good ol days, ya?
@ruouttaurmind oh yes. but those burners where unknown at a consumer level for a while.
perhaps you remember the tales we were told when music CDs first hit the stores -
the price was high (~$15) due to the enormous fail rate in the burning process (perhaps the blanks were unreliable?).
once that got sorted prices were sure to come down to around the $10 mark.
yeah. or, they’d just add it to the profit margin.
@ekw But retail CDs are rarely burned. Burned media doesn’t hold up like pressed media does.
@djslack I’ll take your word for it on burning/pressing. I don’t know how they make the retail ones.
but there was something in the manufacturing process that was causing a very high fail rate.
faulty media or something.
@ekw The first CD I ever purchased was the Eagles Greatest Hits. $15.25 plus tax at Tower Records. That’s about $35 in 2017 money.
Now you can find it at a boot sale for under a buck.
@ruouttaurmind the first album i purchased was the Beatles
@mfladd
@ekw TIL the smart watch does a lot without a phone. I left my phone at home today and didn’t realize until I got to work. My watch connected to WiFi and I could receive texts and respond by voice. I missed a call and my watch let me know. Unsure if it didn’t ring or if it was one of those weird calls that go straight to missed call status.
Anyway, I was impressed.
@djslack I would have to say I am impressed as well.
as you might have guessed from my dickish first post, I had thought these could barely tell time w/o their “married” cell phone within reach.
now I’m just another grumpy old fart, complaining about stuff he doesn’t understand!
@ekw
The tricks that emerging technologies can perform might boggle one’s sense of future shock frequently. So-called “smartwatches” kinda fall in this area.
Then the big new tech settles down and get a bit boring. And something else gets interesting.
Incidentally, if you want maps on your wrist, Garmin makes some “connected watches” and some non-connected watches with visual maps.
These can be useful for sports and the like, if you don’t have a handheld hiking or biking gps on you.
The screen is way too small to be useful for driving.