The Gadgets Page

I haven’t had cable for a few years now, but if I did, I would immediately be buying this TiVo.

• TiVos 4K-ready, commercial skipping Bolt hints at the future

That cool design is both beautiful and functional:

That funky arc shape isnt just there to stick out visually however, as VP Jim Denney told us it also allows the smaller box to vent from the bottom. Its a rather unique design, and in our short time using it the box stayed cool and quiet.

Additionally, The Bolt has the ability to skip commercials. That alone makes it worth having.

Now, the DVR isn’t as good as some. It has four tuners (some of the best have six), but being able to record FOUR shows at a time is plenty good for me.

Gadgets like the TiVo Bolt make me wish that I had cable again. In a lot of respects, I do miss it, and having something like this stylish DVR might just convince me to join the fray again.

Remember when the CEO of Swatch mocked Apple for being willing to have a heart rate function on their Apple Watch?

• Gadgets Page » Swatch CEO Is Baffled By The Apple Watch

As a watch producer, I cannot accept the responsibility of whether my device warns a customer in time before a heart attack.

He’s probably singing a different tune now that an Apple Watch has saved the life of a teen from Massachusetts:

• WCVB – Apple Watch saves a Cape Cod teen’s life

A 17-year-old Tabor Academy senior was at football practice when something felt off. “I had pain in my chest and my back whenever I took some deep breaths,” said Paul Houle Jr. He would have chalked it up to a hot day on the gridiron. But his Apple Watch alerted him to something serious.

“After practice I went and took a nap, my heart rate was still at 145.” The Apple Watch takes your resting heart rate about every minute or so. Houle knew there was a problem when his resting heart rate was more than double his average. He went to the hospital, where he learned he had heart, liver and kidney failure, which could have been fatal if not for his watch.

“If my Apple Watch hadn’t shown me it was 145, I would have done nothing about it.” Houle’s dad is grateful his son is healthy. His dad didn’t want to buy the Apple Watch, but after his son’s ordeal, he went out Saturday and purchased one for his wife and himself. Houle can’t play football just yet, but he has something else to look forward to – an internship next summer with Apple.

I am so grateful for my Apple Watch because it has made my life easier in so many ways, but this sort of story makes that little piece of technology appear to be miraculous.

There is an entire junk folder full of apps on my iPhone and iPad. They are apps that I can’t delete, no matter how much I want to. The undelete-able apps include: Calculator, Reminders, Game Center, iTunes Store, App Store, FaceTime, Notes, Contacts, Voice Memos, Stocks, Tips, Weather, Newstand, iBooks, Compass, and Passbook. Some of those apps are useful and some of them are not. It depends on who you are and how you use your phone. I find it so irritating that I can’t get rid of them on my devices.

According to BuzzFeed, it looks like Tim Cook is looking at isolating each of these apps and allowing some of them to be deleted.

• 20 Minutes With Tim Cook – BuzzFeed News

“This is a more complex issue than it first appears,” he says. “There are some apps that are linked to something else on the iPhone. If they were to be removed they might cause issues elsewhere on the phone. There are other apps that aren’t like that. So over time, I think with the ones that aren’t like that, we’ll figure out a way [for you to remove them]. … It’s not that we want to suck up your real estate; we’re not motivated to do that. We want you to be happy. So I recognize that some people want to do this, and it’s something we’re looking at.”

I am glad they’re “looking” at that option. Honestly, they should have been looking at that a long time ago. I seriously don’t want a junk folder where I have to shuffle those apps that I never use. Just let me delete them.

Update 09-17-15

With the new operating system, you can now delete the Newstand folder as long as you don’t have any apps in it. Unfortunately, they have added Find My Friends and Find My iPhone to the can’t delete list. One step forward, two steps back…

Anita Sarkeesian has created a brilliant analysis of the boring tropes that video games have been using ever since the beginning of gaming. Her YouTube channel, Feminist Frequency, has all the videos, but here is a playlist of the entire series:

After watching these videos, I suddenly felt a huge relief. THIS is why I don’t like so many games. I don’t really want to save the damsel in distress. I don’t want to earn rewards that take the clothes off the women in the video game. I always felt as if I was not the target audience of the video game industry and now I know why. They have LITERALLY written games that only appeal to less than half the population. LESS THAN HALF.

That is so sad and fiscally idiotic. Women want to go on adventures, too. We don’t want to save our husbands or boyfriends. We want to bring them and our friends along with us. Write games for EVERYONE and you will sell more. I can’t stress how important this is. A good game that lets EVERYONE play will make millions of dollars. It will sell game consoles. I wish I could reach into the minds of every game designer out there and make them understand that if they STOP writing games for straight males and START writing games for EVERYONE, then they will make so much more money.

Plus, I could really use a fun and interesting game right now. I’m getting a little sick of all the Bejeweled rip offs.

When Apple introduced the Apple Watch it presented it as the heir to the tradition of classic luxury mechanical watches. It has a Digital Crown. It has Complications. It’s relatively expensive, depending on which version you buy, and you can spend $400 or more on a band for it.

But one thing Apple never mentions is that the history of watches also includes the digital watches that first appeared in the 70s and gained real traction in the 80s with LCD displays. I grew up during this time and between ages 5 and 30 I owned only one analog watch (Mickey Mouse, of course) but about 30 digital ones, ranging from simple time displays to calculators and world time displays and even a Casio Databank that could store my contacts and phone numbers.

I love my Apple Watch and after owning it for a while I rely on it daily, but there are a few things I miss from those classic digital watches. Here are some ideas, some of which I’m hopeful will appear in future versions of the Apple Watch, others merely dreams…

Buttons That Change Displays

The very first LCD watches had a large display with only four digits and a punctuation mark. They usually displayed the time, but you could press a button and temporarily switch to the date, or even in some cases a display of seconds.

Some of the Apple Watch display options are just as limited as those early watches: the Motion, X-Large, and Photo displays can only display the time, and a couple of others (Solar, Astronomy) add a date to that.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a button that could alternate that time display with a date, or the stopwatch, or your heart rate? I have just the button in mind–that little square one below the crown that pulls up a list of contacts that I never use. If that button could change displays I could use some of those nice photo display options–instead, I stick with Modular because I want lots of information.

Buttons That Change Modes

Here’s another idea for that button on the side of the watch. On the more complicated digital watches that appeared later in the 80s, you could use a button to switch modes–for example stopwatch mode, countdown timer, or alarm settings. The Apple watch already has different modes–apps and glances. What if you could configure a list of your favorite glances or apps, and have the button cycle between them? I only use two or three apps regularly so this would work great for me.

I know Apple likes to avoid features like this-–buttons that change functions depending on which mode you are in, or depending on your settings–but on a watch with a limited number of buttons, it would make the watch’s many different apps and glances much easier to access.

More Buttons

I’m hopeful that Apple might add the features above–they could even avoid using the button, since currently swiping left and right on the display don’t do anything. But now let’s talk about some things that are less likely to happen–areas where my old Casio calculator watch will still have the advantage for a long time.

First, what if there were more buttons? I don’t need the full calculator, but the usual 4 buttons of an 80s digital watch would be great. Especially if I could configure them myself. I’d have a workout button and a heart rate button, and maybe a calculator button, and I wouldn’t need to use the on-screen menu at all.

Longer Battery Life

Continuing to dream the impossible… My digital watches had ridiculously long battery life. Forget charging every day, they could last for years. In fact, I usually bought a new watch before I replaced the battery. I realize that Bluetooth and the colored display make this one unlikely, but I’d love it if they could make a future model with a battery that at least lasted a few days. As it is, if I forget to charge the watch at night, I have to take it off for an hour to charge during the day.

Always-on Display

One final dream for a future Apple Watch. The one thing my digital watches of the 80s and the classic analog watches had in common is that the display was always visible. Due to the constraints of current technology, Apple has recreated one aspect of the earliest LED digital watches of the 1970s: the display isn’t turned on until you ask for it. This is why I don’t use any of the attractive watch faces, sticking with the information-filled Modular display instead–I can’t impress anyone with my watch face if all they see is a black square on my wrist.

Conclusion

I love the Apple Watch. To me it’s the natural successor not to the classic automatic watches, but to my late-80s calculator watch. It gives me lots of information and lets me do lots of things. I hope, either with software or hardware updates, it eventually reaches the point where the only thing I miss from those old digital watches is their sense of style.