However the best thing I find on the pebble is - Battery Life, - Readability in daylight, - Slim and light weight.
Smart Watches are quite nascent tech and if we get to where we get ones that are amalgamation of all these features, I'll be a content man.
Oh, and saying "What's my name" and having Siri respond "Your name is <name>, but since we're friends I get to call you Captain James T Kirk". But that's just personal amusement.
I use it for stuff I forget to buy when I'm shopping, mostly. The stuff you don't buy often, like "remind me to get deodorant when I'm at Kroger."
Also the timer-type reminders/alarms are great.
I really wish it was easier to compose notes and the like. I finally found how to reliably get a newline with the voice keyboard (by saying "period newline"...the period is required).
"Her" was pretty inspiring for all of the voice-related stuff. But I'm still weird about using voice commands in public. If everyone was, I'd get over it.
Seems a lot more suspicious of me for some reason..
Another problem is typified by a commmon Android Wear app which allows you to request a fake phone call on your phone. This example shows one of the use cases for a wearable: its a device you can look at when its socially or physically awkward to pull out a phone. You don't want to say, "Google, this meeting is boring!" But you might want a button that lets you do something about it.
One could get around most of that by being able to set aliases for often used apps, like, "quick open 1." If it's hard to open a seldom used app, it's not that big a deal.
What's fiddly about buttons? It's much faster than swiping a couple of times to get to the option you want.
I agree that there are disadvantages too. One of my jackets does make it harder to access all the buttons. And scrolling through a list one item at a time can be more annoying than just swiping and tapping on the item you want.
I also own a Moto 360 which is okay but honestly I'm not as big of a fan as I thought I would be. If they made Pebble Time have touch controls to get rid of the big buttons I would buy this thing in a heart beat.
I very much prefer to type, it's faster even on a touch screen.
So here I am, waiting for a subvocal recognition system and the comeback of off-line speech processing.
I'm not sure if it'll use it anytime there's a data connection, though.
I've also noticed it has a couple of flaws, like you can't use "newline" with it.
Maybe it's because I'm from Minnesota and sound like Don LaFontaine, but Google's voice recognition is easily 95% or better for me. Probably closer to 98%, even on spoken sentences for sending emails or texts. When I'm navigating, or trying to call someone, it's closer to 99%.
If you look on the wear store, apps that create rows of icons on your watch face are very popular. I think that shows that this is a common concern.
Its just too annoying for most people to use.
What voice recognition reminds me of, is a disobedient / distracted little kid, the kind you have to tell everything twice.
I'm not sure my success rate is any better than that typing on my iPhone.
I've noticed UIs always get "needier" over time. Call it VLM's Law. In the old days a dumbphone could be operated tactile in total darkness without looking at it at all. Then smartphones came along which needed occasional glances at the screen to verify the screen and touch screen position/orientation (portrait vs auto-rotated landscape). Now you need to stare continuously at the screen to watch mistakes in the speech to text dictation system as you slowly, tediously, agonizingly argue with a machine.
How clumsy of a UI, like going thru life wearing oven mitts. And VLMs Law is it always gets worse over time. It'll take a lot of work, but we'll find a way to make UIs even more painful.
#nostalgia
Meh, most of the time I can just whisper something ambigious if I'm concerned about privacy, or just pull out my big ass phone and type on it, which is what I would have done if I didn't own a moto 360.
I tried one of those keyboards for the watch, and its really a non-starter. Wearables only make sense as voice devices. Even the large moto 360 can't support an on-screen keyboard and I imagine future smartwatches will be smaller, especially one's marketed at women and children.
I just saw a TV show the other day where the bomb squad was driving a robot with an iPad. Yes, all driving input and finite movement of the robot arms was done on a touch screen.
Terrible idea; nobody would do that in real life.