Warren Ellis captures what smartwatches are good for

[andrewducker]

I've gone from having the phone in my hand much of the time to really not touching it much at all.  I already have a lot of soundcodes on my phone -- I know when my kid is texting me, or when Snapchat or Breaking News is going off -- but you can only fine-grain that so much.  I don't know *who* is Snapping me, I don't know if the newsflash is worth taking the phone out for, I don't know if the email is from a human or a robot.  That all kicks to my wrist now.  The phone stays in my pocket a lot more.  The speedbumps in my day that it smooths out are probably trivial, but the new layer of distance and quiet that it introduces feels real.

This rings very true to me. I still use my phone a lot - for a start it's mostly how I read most of my 110-odd RSS feeds, but if a text, email, or tweet comes in I know if it's something I need to look at or not, and I know I don't need to take my phone out of my pocket to see if something "exciting" has happened.

If you're not someone like me, and you don't get many notifications on your phone, then you probably don't need one for that. You may want one for keeping track of how far you walk, or to track your heart rate. But as I don't do either of these things (this week), I can't help you there...

Comments

[azurelunatic]

This is a major part of the function it fills for me.

I also like that I can use mine to launch phone calls, as it seems like people rely more on digital assistants for voice control dialing now, rather than having strong headset support for it.