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Siri for sending txt messages is much more useful on the Apple watch. Also checking messages is more discrete and less disruptive with the apple watch. Use mi

by tdburn 10y ago

Siri for sending txt messages is much more useful on the Apple watch. Also checking messages is more discrete and less disruptive with the apple watch. Use mine constantly for this. Don't care about the health trackers, wish I could delete that completely

heywire 10y ago
And for me, it is completely the opposite. Text messages are for when I can't or don't want to speak on the phone (sometimes because I don't want the whole room to hear my conversation). So I have no need to send text messages from my watch. I'm more interested in the constant monitoring of heart rate, movement, etc., with the added features of notifications, silent alarms, and music control (though I don't really use music control either). That is precisely why I chose the Fitbit Blaze over the Apple Watch, even though I'm a very happy iPhone owner.
- MBCook 10y ago
  > I'm more interested in the constant monitoring of heart rate, movement, etc., with the added features of notifications, silent alarms, and music control (though I don't really use music control either). It does all that. The Siri integration is a killer-app for me though. I use it all the time (when alone) to set reminders, reply to texts, etc. But since it's from Apple it will always have better messaging integration than any 3rd party could EVER provide. Of course I'm guessing the Blaze is much cheaper. While it doesn't apply here, I'll also say that I've come to hate FitBit. They really don't want to play with other people and I had to buy an extra app (that I have to run every few days) just to sync data from my last remaining FitBit device to Health on my iPhone. Since I first bought one they seem to have gone from very open to hostile and closed. And I don't want to reward that. (And that ignores my customer support experience, which alone turned me off from them)
  - heywire 10y ago
    > It does all that. Sure, I didn't mean to imply that it doesn't. I was simply illustrating how different people have different use cases for these wearable devices. While we may see some more convergence, I think that multiple categories will remain (fitness, etc). > I use it all the time (when alone) to set reminders, reply to texts, etc. The great thing about the iPhone and Siri is that you don't need a watch to do that. Most of the time I don't even have to pull my phone from my pocket to do a "Hey Siri". Apple seems to have done a pretty decent job with the voice recognition and hotword detection (I think that's the right term). > Of course I'm guessing the Blaze is much cheaper. Actually not much. The Blaze retails for $199.
    - MBCook 10y ago
      I knew you knew it did all the other stuff. You're right about the phone, but it's very nice to be able to just raise my wrist and sort of whisper into my watch. I don't have to make sure I'm loud enough that my phone can hear me from my pocket. It just feels easier/more natural if you don't already have your phone in your hand. I wonder if the pricing on the Blaze was set before the latest Apple Watches came out. That would have been a decent value against $350 or whatever they were, but now that a very nice one starts at $260 it's a tougher sell.
      - brlewis 10y ago
        Blaze does not appear to be a tough sell on Amazon. Right now different Blaze models place 1st, 3rd, 5th, 8th, 11th and 12th in the top 12 places on https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Cell-Phones-Accessories-Smart-Watches/zgbs/wireless/7939901011 https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Cell-Phones-Accessories-... Apple Watch models in spots 2 and 10.
        MBCook 10y ago
        Interesting. The big catch on buying an Apple Watch right now is that depending on the model you want you can still face a pretty decent delay in being able to get one. All things being equal I wonder how that would affect the rankings.
    - acdha 10y ago
      > Most of the time I don't even have to pull my phone from my pocket to do a "Hey Siri". Apple seems to have done a pretty decent job with the voice recognition and hotword detection (I think that's the right term). My experience is that “hey siri” works well if you're somewhere quiet but it's really prone to false-positives, even for things which sound nothing like th at. Most of the other iPhone users I know have commented about disabling that after Siri kept activating in meetings, which is the same reason I turned it off after a couple days, and then hoping that the next hardware release would do a better job. Maybe the 7S… Amazon appears to have done a much better job - their users talk admit how good it is rather than joking about how it's faster to get there phone out of your pocket than retry your Siri query multiple times.
  - brlewis 10y ago
    Disclaimer: I work for Fitbit, but am not involved in iOS development or policy. Fitbit has an API. Apple has developers. If Apple's app needs another app to get Fitbit data, hate Apple. Fitbit is trying to hire more iOS devs, and the ones we have are too busy trying to make our app better for us to loan them out to Apple to make Apple's app better.
    - MBCook 10y ago
      I'm aware they have an API, that's how the app I use works to move the data around. If you're not aware Health stores data in a repository on the phone, it's not a cloud service. It doesn't really provide any features, it's just a central repository for all apps on the phone to share health data. It doesn't do meal planning or exercise tracking or anything else like that. You get those things by choosing other apps yourself (or using the Activity app if you have a Watch) Apple doesn't use the FitBit API because it doesn't use ANY API. It's job is not to go fetch data from other places, it's the repository that other places put their data in by the APIs Apple provides. MyFitnessPal is able to do this, along with RunKeeper, Pedometer++, and TONS of other apps. It's a nice little system and works very well. It respects my privacy. FitBit doesn't provide Apple Health integration. THEY want to be the repository, have the control, access the data. This reminds me of when game center was first created on iOS and many games decided not to support it and to support something else instead. You know what happened to those other things? They died. There was too much friction and having to have additional logins and multiple systems and friend list and all the other things that went with it. The stuff integrated into the platform provided by the OS vendor wins unless there is a very compelling reason. Right now every single health-based app I try works just fine on my phone and can access all the data. Except FitBit. Why should every single app I download have to have FitBit's API and have me sign in just to be able to read data that's already on my phone? Why should I have to re-authorize each of them every 30 days? Why should I have to depend on the cloud service working for data I enter in one app on my phone to show up in another app on my phone when there's a perfectly good system service available? FitBit's position isn't strong enough to win. Their approach provides no benefit to me, only to them. It makes my life harder. The only reason their position is as strong as it is is because they were one of the first out of the gate with health trackers in their current form, giving them a very large market share. I think if you tried to start a new business today, even with a good brand name that already existed (coming from non-tech fitness brands) The approach that FitBit is taking would fail. Hard.

by tdburn 10y ago

heywire 10y ago

And for me, it is completely the opposite. Text messages are for when I can't or don't want to speak on the phone (sometimes because I don't want the whole room to hear my conversation). So I have no need to send text messages from my watch. I'm more interested in the constant monitoring of heart rate, movement, etc., with the added features of notifications, silent alarms, and music control (though I don't really use music control either). That is precisely why I chose the Fitbit Blaze over the Apple Watch, even though I'm a very happy iPhone owner.

MBCook 10y ago
> I'm more interested in the constant monitoring of heart rate, movement, etc., with the added features of notifications, silent alarms, and music control (though I don't really use music control either). It does all that. The Siri integration is a killer-app for me though. I use it all the time (when alone) to set reminders, reply to texts, etc. But since it's from Apple it will always have better messaging integration than any 3rd party could EVER provide. Of course I'm guessing the Blaze is much cheaper. While it doesn't apply here, I'll also say that I've come to hate FitBit. They really don't want to play with other people and I had to buy an extra app (that I have to run every few days) just to sync data from my last remaining FitBit device to Health on my iPhone. Since I first bought one they seem to have gone from very open to hostile and closed. And I don't want to reward that. (And that ignores my customer support experience, which alone turned me off from them)
- heywire 10y ago
  > It does all that. Sure, I didn't mean to imply that it doesn't. I was simply illustrating how different people have different use cases for these wearable devices. While we may see some more convergence, I think that multiple categories will remain (fitness, etc). > I use it all the time (when alone) to set reminders, reply to texts, etc. The great thing about the iPhone and Siri is that you don't need a watch to do that. Most of the time I don't even have to pull my phone from my pocket to do a "Hey Siri". Apple seems to have done a pretty decent job with the voice recognition and hotword detection (I think that's the right term). > Of course I'm guessing the Blaze is much cheaper. Actually not much. The Blaze retails for $199.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    I knew you knew it did all the other stuff. You're right about the phone, but it's very nice to be able to just raise my wrist and sort of whisper into my watch. I don't have to make sure I'm loud enough that my phone can hear me from my pocket. It just feels easier/more natural if you don't already have your phone in your hand. I wonder if the pricing on the Blaze was set before the latest Apple Watches came out. That would have been a decent value against $350 or whatever they were, but now that a very nice one starts at $260 it's a tougher sell.
    - brlewis 10y ago
      Blaze does not appear to be a tough sell on Amazon. Right now different Blaze models place 1st, 3rd, 5th, 8th, 11th and 12th in the top 12 places on https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Cell-Phones-Accessories-Smart-Watches/zgbs/wireless/7939901011 https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Cell-Phones-Accessories-... Apple Watch models in spots 2 and 10.
      - MBCook 10y ago
        Interesting. The big catch on buying an Apple Watch right now is that depending on the model you want you can still face a pretty decent delay in being able to get one. All things being equal I wonder how that would affect the rankings.
  - acdha 10y ago
    > Most of the time I don't even have to pull my phone from my pocket to do a "Hey Siri". Apple seems to have done a pretty decent job with the voice recognition and hotword detection (I think that's the right term). My experience is that “hey siri” works well if you're somewhere quiet but it's really prone to false-positives, even for things which sound nothing like th at. Most of the other iPhone users I know have commented about disabling that after Siri kept activating in meetings, which is the same reason I turned it off after a couple days, and then hoping that the next hardware release would do a better job. Maybe the 7S… Amazon appears to have done a much better job - their users talk admit how good it is rather than joking about how it's faster to get there phone out of your pocket than retry your Siri query multiple times.
- brlewis 10y ago
  Disclaimer: I work for Fitbit, but am not involved in iOS development or policy. Fitbit has an API. Apple has developers. If Apple's app needs another app to get Fitbit data, hate Apple. Fitbit is trying to hire more iOS devs, and the ones we have are too busy trying to make our app better for us to loan them out to Apple to make Apple's app better.
  - MBCook 10y ago
    I'm aware they have an API, that's how the app I use works to move the data around. If you're not aware Health stores data in a repository on the phone, it's not a cloud service. It doesn't really provide any features, it's just a central repository for all apps on the phone to share health data. It doesn't do meal planning or exercise tracking or anything else like that. You get those things by choosing other apps yourself (or using the Activity app if you have a Watch) Apple doesn't use the FitBit API because it doesn't use ANY API. It's job is not to go fetch data from other places, it's the repository that other places put their data in by the APIs Apple provides. MyFitnessPal is able to do this, along with RunKeeper, Pedometer++, and TONS of other apps. It's a nice little system and works very well. It respects my privacy. FitBit doesn't provide Apple Health integration. THEY want to be the repository, have the control, access the data. This reminds me of when game center was first created on iOS and many games decided not to support it and to support something else instead. You know what happened to those other things? They died. There was too much friction and having to have additional logins and multiple systems and friend list and all the other things that went with it. The stuff integrated into the platform provided by the OS vendor wins unless there is a very compelling reason. Right now every single health-based app I try works just fine on my phone and can access all the data. Except FitBit. Why should every single app I download have to have FitBit's API and have me sign in just to be able to read data that's already on my phone? Why should I have to re-authorize each of them every 30 days? Why should I have to depend on the cloud service working for data I enter in one app on my phone to show up in another app on my phone when there's a perfectly good system service available? FitBit's position isn't strong enough to win. Their approach provides no benefit to me, only to them. It makes my life harder. The only reason their position is as strong as it is is because they were one of the first out of the gate with health trackers in their current form, giving them a very large market share. I think if you tried to start a new business today, even with a good brand name that already existed (coming from non-tech fitness brands) The approach that FitBit is taking would fail. Hard.