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Smart Watches

2nd Gen Moto 360 Android Watch
1 Day Batt Life w/ Ambient On 
Large mens (style) smart watches with touchscreen action in increasingly elegant housings, doomed with terrible battery life. Even the Apple Watch Series 2 fails to give a full day of battery life! Fitbit & Pebble offering 5 to 10 days of runtime! Mechanical watches still hold an edge over their high tech replacements! 

Sealed non-serviceable batteries along with software limitations rendering these emergent wrist mounted computer watches defunct in just a few years. Classic mechanical watches are far more enduring as stylish accessories that can stand up to the test of time :P

Your Already a Cyborg

More phone pairing accessories then stand alone mobile computing platforms, smartwatches with bluetooth low energy & NFC often linking to bigger data IO platforms, notably to your smartphone of choice, then online by extension to your tertiary self, the digital you that exists as a set of IP requests, cookies and metadata stored by PRISM.

Your Facebook page and twitter account painting a digital equivalent extension of your mind, its the interface technology that is limiting the progress between your fingertips and the screens on which you touch the information. Brain computer interface innovations needed to jack the cortex directly into AI computers that will be descendants of the smart devices widely used today!

When you talk to your smartphone, Siri, Google Now, Alexa, Cortana, whichever AI flavor, you are interacting with a digital extension of your mind! The birth of AI technology the outward manifestation of consciousness into information technology! The age of thinking machines is already upon us with wolfram alpha and personal digital assistants that understand natural language questions. Siri might be kinda stupid today, just wait to see how Siri becomes super intelligent in the future! The more you interact with voice controlled AI and search engines, twitter and Facebook, the more you develop your tertiary form, you are already a cyborg, smartwatches only extend this hybridization further.
Seiko 5 Automatic
21 Jewel Movement! 
The Seiko 5

Going the way of classic wrist mounted timepieces, I abstain at times from the high-tech sensor fusion of my Fitbit Surge (R) and strap on a Seiko 5 7S26 caliber Automatic of predominately stainless steel construction. With its 21 jewel movement the sweeping second hand smoothly demarcates the passage of time while a weight swings beneath the skeletonize rear case enclosure, winding the mainspring with kinetic energy recovery as my wrist moves about throughout the day. The 12 hours markings enhanced with phosphorescent glow in the dark dots that capture ambient light and then emit a green glow via a quantum mechanical photon energy conversion process. The snug polymer band of my Fitbit Surge causing wrist skin rash formation problems. I default to my automatic mechanical watches while the healing process occurs automatically :P

Fitbit Surge GPS Fitness Tracker
Heart Rate Monitoring
Automatic Sleep Tracking
Step Count, Time, Timers
Multiple Watch Face Designs
Bluetooth LE to Phone App
5 days Battery Life
Cheap

Analog, mechanical, no batteries and an extremely long shelf life, the mechanical watches is almost entirely metal and glass. The $50 automatic watch from Overstock.com that I picked up was remarkably affordable. The Japanese watch making industry long King of democratizing access to otherwise exotically expensive swiss time keeping technologies from yesteryear. Without batteries, the operating costs of the automatic are remarkably low, almost entirely contained within the initial capital cost structure, and the time expended to reset the movement if the automatic watch goes unworn for an extended period.

Enduring

My aging Seiko 5 ticks on after more than 9 years in my collection, often going into a totally still sleep when I remove it, the spring energy storage system exhausted after about ~45 hours of not being worn. Automatic watches must be worn in order for the swinging weight winder to store energy in the mainspring. Electric winder holders exist if you insist on keeping them constantly running so as to avoid having to set the movement every time you swap out your watch for another model from your collection. I started wearing digital watches when my best friends mother gave me a plastic casio water resistant model when I was 7 years old. (see image below) The original battery ran the watch for almost 8 years! The watch was destroyed in a snowboarding accident in 1998.

Similar to my 1990 Model
Accessory Style

Mechanical watches are not about absolute time precision, leave that to the cesium atomic clocks at NIST. Mechanical watches are about classic style and relatively useful time precision without the cheap plastic quarts non-sense pedaled to common people who care little for how things work. The mechanical watch is for someone a little different in this era, someone who likes the history of science and technology or even just the deep green ecology and convenient of a watch without batteries that winds itself when you wear it! I am curious to see how my automatic watch hold up over time, so far they are doing wonderfully!

A 1983 Seiko 5 (note the swinging winder weight & gears
Devoid of Digital

No touch screens or micro-computers, no heart rate sensors, no MEMS gyro's or accelerometers, no compass, no electricity, nothing digital about them, except perhaps at the manufacturing stages, especially in Japan where the movement of this Seiko 5 was mass produced to imbue it with the economic advantages of high volume manufacturing! I find it amazing they were able to produce, distribute and sell something like this for only $50!

Pebble Time 2 : Color E-Paper : 10 days Batt Life
Heart Rate Tracking + Sleep Tracking : No GPS
Youtube Tech Videos

I was watching a youtube video about the 5 best smartwatch in 2016, all of them hindered by horrendously short battery life, often only 1 day before needed to be recharged, how annoying!
Even Apple cannot figure out how to give a few days of runtime to their watch computers! At least Apple put inductive charging in their designs! Fitbit did succeed in giving the Surge 5 days of real world battery life (up to 7) and that is more than 500% better then other competing devices. The Surge even has stand along GPS, although using GPS sucks the battery to flat in just a few hours. Similarly the Pebble computer watches have relatively good battery life, mainly due to E-Inks power sipping info display properties along with extensive board power reduction optimization!
The Apple Watch Series 2
1000nits Screen :)
18hrs Batt Life :(
Nano-watts

I was reading about the ARM processor in my Apple Magic Mouse 2 on the chip manufacturers website, amazed that it can run on as little as 8 nano-watts of power in a low power semi-sleep mode. Similarly Fitbit used extreme power optimization by minimizing the OS software footprint, using a super power efficient screen technology, and lots of hard work by the engineering staff that made it all possible!

Screen energy use along with power used by the CPU, GPU, RAM, FLASH and the Touch controller, don't forget the radio chipsets that give bluetooth and NFC functionality! The reason most of these smartphone watches have to be charged every day comes down to the power consumption of all the components balanced against a rechargeable battery that is small enough to fit within a watch case along with everything else, including LED lights and imaging sensors for heart rate analysis. I am surprised that the wrist bands of smartwatches are not being used for battery energy storage.

Tiny Computers

ARM processors dominate low power computing platforms, some with incredible computational power. Most smartphones today making use of an ARM designed CPU fabricated by one of more than a dozen integrated chip manufacturing companies. Almost all of IOT wearable computer devices make use of a handful of different chipsets from a handful of different companies. If you consider the total engineering that is present in a given design, including the chipset developments, then these high tech smartwatches are the cumulative engineering output of thousands of engineers working in hundreds of teams at dozens of different companies. Shared wealthy and prosperity thereby created by these high tech devices.

Tech Eco-Dirty

Sadly, because of the complex manufacturing, electronics are some of the dirties things made in terms of the net environmental footprint of their design and manufacturing, extending even further by net lifetime energy use, inefficiencies in charging making that impact greater, its amazing to look at the environmental sustainability report for an iPhone, to see how such a small device has such a large footprint. The digital footprint of its user even greater as energy consumed by data centers to host the clouds that given our smartphones NLP voice search AI braun, systems of systems, just like the human body, extremely complicated when you consider the entirety of it all!

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