It has issues but I would rather see reform of patents first. Given the greater pace of developments now, effectively they now represent a proportionately longer period now than in the past. And they are too broad, along with various abuses (especially around novelty)
I genuinely love mine. It's very much as this review says.
I like that it does a specific amount of functionality really well, rather than over reaching and then trying too much yet delivering poorly
The battery life is the single reason I expect to keep using it. Every order smart watch I've had had been okay but usually quite meh, and at some point I've grown tired of the endless inconvenience of charging... So I leave it off for a few days, that gets longer and then I realise I can't be bothered to keep using it. Whereas this one lasts 20 days at least, it's not hostile to me (no pinging endlessly), I get how it works (none of that crazy Google Store confusion about what is a phone app and what is a watch app!) and it has a great ecosystem around it.
> I like that it does a specific amount of functionality really well, rather than over reaching and then trying too much yet delivering poorly
This is exactly how I feel about my old school Casio wristwatch. I find it mind boggling that people want to put a smartphone-type addiction machine on their wrist.
YMMV depending on specific needs but generally even on Windows on an average machine with an imperfect setup I've found it exceptionally fast, often well inside the sub-second range, to the point that I do sometimes worry if it really ran.
Sounds like it's worth another look at your settings to make sure they are right.
Would be nice if the site could show people what it did without first handing over camera access - if it's useful enough once I know what it does, I would consider granting it then but not before.
Never heard of GS1 before, let alone GS1 Sunrise but it's presumably behind an annoying and, one would hope, entirely avoidable frustration in Boots in the UK.
They obviously turned on QR code scanning capability on their tills at some point recently(ish) - I can't recall when but I think it was around a year ago. They turned it on, even though their products use 1D barcodes... And now, whenever a consumer item has a QR code too, the till freaks out when it reads the wrong one! They absolutely could ignore the QR code but their dev managers must care so little that this obvious fix is skipped and their continue to annoy customers needlessly.
Interesting that none of the talk around this has touched on any form of enforcement, even though this is illegal activity in US/EU.
Any fine would be peanuts for them but it might help to refocus the mindset from "oops, misconfiguration" to "test security but do so with care, consent and in line with the law"
This is sad but no great surprise. What does surprise me a little is how far ranging the "we can't make those parts anymore" argument goes. I thought back to those seriously slim Sony Walkman and Aiwa players people would bring back to school from the Far East and even the basic things like the sliding buttons were better than products have nowadays: they would inevitably be tiny, sleek, yet beautifully engineered to still be easy to push/slide, they'd be metal, often powder coated to match the body, would involve super low tolerances, and have a satisfying quality reminiscent of closing/opening the door of a Mercedes! It feels like we can't even do them justice now... Or maybe it's just the economics?!
Either way, what an era that was!
Some things we have today have incredible build quality compared to anything that existed in the 80s and 90s. Compare any flagship phone today and the tight tolerances between the edges of different parts of the assembly compared to any walkman. Now of course there are downsides to the way phones are constructed, many downsides. My point is simply that the quality of construction is very high today for some things.
I’ve driven many 90s and 2000s jdm cars and I also own a 2019 Japanese car and the quality of the 2019 car is just incomparable. The 90s cars feel like bits of plastic thrown together haphazardly, not that different from like an industrial Japanese truck’s interior. The cars are legendary sure but the interiors are awful.
Now those cars are much older too, but my 2019 car’s interior looks damn near brand new despite having been in the harsh Australian sun for 6 to 7 years, while I remember older cars I owned didn’t fare so well after just 5 years.
Duping tapes on cheap decks to get one ratty-sounding copy, or spending more money to get a better-sounding original copy at the local record store downtown -- for it to eventually find itself wrapped around the pinch roller.
The weird featuresets: Some bougie later ones had auto-reverse, so the days of flipping a tape were over. But some players couldn't even stop on their own at the end of a tape when rewinding or fast-fowarding. (And some only had fast-forward. Want to rewind? Eject tape, flip tape, FF tape, flip again.)
The awesome battery life: I could get, like, whole several trips to and from school out of a pair of AA batteries -- if I was lucky! Replacing them in advance to ward off inevitable failure lead to fun games like having an assortment of variously-used batteries to experiment with when the small stack of new ones inevitably ran dry.
The awesome fidelity: A bass boost switch sometimes, even though the headphones had no bass anyway. An ineffective 3-band EQ if fancy. The interactive wow and flutter of having one in a pants pocket on the move, keeping time with your pace. The stereo image that was always just a little bit offset and slightly closer to the left or right ear than the middle.
The musical selection: It was always such an excellent time selecting a singular tape to listen to for the day, because carrying more than that took up real physical space.
Besides all that: Stopping to change tapes on these precious devices would attract attention, and attention was an astounding thing in a world with plumes of tetraethyl lead in the air. After that, there's no longer a walkman nor any tapes, but at least you've got a new black eye to talk about and the music selection problem is completely resolved!
Yeah, it was certainly an era.
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If someone from the future had somehow come back and showed the 1990 version of me any of our modern pocket supercomputers along with a $20 pair of wireless earbuds and access to Spotify, I'd have simply revered them as a god.
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