So Samsung stood up in Berlin on Wednesday, right before IFA officially kicked off, and showed off the Galaxy Note 3 and, more interestingly to me, the Galaxy Gear. A smartwatch. With a camera in the strap. I've had two days to read the specs and watch the demo clips and I keep landing in the same spot: I don't get it yet, and I say that as someone who already wears a smartwatch every single day.
Yeah, I'm a Pebble guy. Backed the Kickstarter back in 2012 like half the internet did, waited the extra months past the original ship date, and I've had one strapped to my wrist since spring. So I'm not a smartwatch skeptic in the abstract sense. I'm just skeptical of this particular watch, at this particular price, doing this particular list of things.
The Gear is $299. My Pebble was $150, and even that felt like a stretch when I clicked the pledge button at 1am. For $299 the Gear also only talks to a small handful of Samsung phones (Note 3, Note 2, S4 as far as anyone's confirmed), which is a bigger deal than it sounds. My Pebble pairs with basically any modern iPhone or Android phone over Bluetooth LE and I never think about it again. Locking a $300 accessory to one manufacturer's current-gen lineup is a strange bet even for Samsung, who ships more phones than anyone.
Then there's the camera. 1.9 megapixels, tucked into the wristband, and every hands-on video so far shows people holding their arm up like they're checking the time on a watch that also happens to be filming whoever's standing in front of them. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong and this is the thing that makes wrist-cameras normal, the way the iPhone made phone-cameras normal. But my gut says it's going to be the feature everyone mentions in the review and nobody actually uses past week two, kind of like the barometer on my old Nexus.
Battery life is the other thing nobody's talking about enough. Early word is something like a day, maybe a bit more if you're not doing much with it. My Pebble does about a week on a charge, and even that occasionally annoys me when I forget to plug it in on a Sunday night. A smartwatch that needs a nightly charge on top of my phone's nightly charge is one more cable, one more thing to forget at a hotel, one more low-battery notification competing for my attention at 4pm.
None of this is really about Samsung being bad at hardware, because they're clearly not, the screen and the build quality look genuinely nice in photos. It's more that I think the whole category is still figuring out what a watch is even supposed to do, and "phone, but smaller and on your arm" isn't automatically the right answer just because it's the obvious one. My Pebble does exactly four things well: shows the time, buzzes when a text or call comes in, runs a stopwatch, and lets me skip songs without touching my phone. That's it. That's the whole feature set and it's why I still wear the thing. It solves a small, boring problem instead of trying to solve a big flashy one.
(Also, separately, I cannot get over Microsoft buying Nokia's phone business this week for something like seven billion dollars. I had a Nokia 3310 in middle school that survived getting run over by a car. Feels like the end of an era, even if the era ended a while ago and I just didn't notice.)
Anyway. IFA runs through the weekend so there's going to be more of this stuff, smartwatches and tablets and whatever else gets announced in Berlin hotel conference rooms. I'll probably keep reading about the Gear out of morbid curiosity even though I already know I'm not buying one. Ask me again in six months, I guess. That's usually how long it takes me to admit I was wrong about a gadget.