Apple’s new smartwatch can track your heart rate, pay for your Chicken McNuggets and give you turn-by-turn directions by sending vibrations to your wrist. You can even buy one in 18-karat gold. The device, which will be available early next year, is the latest in slick wearable technology, a booming category that includes Google Glass, the Jawbone Up fitness tracker and Liquid Image goggle-cameras.
But are these innovations really game-changers for travelers?
GAME CHANGER?
Photo: Reuters
On one hand, it’s amusing to contemplate the promise of wearable technology (or wearables) when the travel industry is still trying to solve basic problems like how to board 300 people onto an airplane without the process devolving into a stampede. I’m reminded of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” — the pyramid that illustrates how rudimentary physiological requirements like food and shelter must be met before we can concern ourselves with less crucial desires. If there were such a pyramid for travel, boarding a plane with Jetsons-style alacrity would come before watches and glasses that alert us to the nearest Margaritaville.
On the other hand, wearables, particularly the Apple Watch, could eventually transform the way we travel. Given that sensors on the back of the device can track your pulse rate, perhaps it might also detect if you’re becoming unruly during a flight and follow up with a zap to your wrist and a stress-reduction video?
Fantasies aside, some technology and travel experts see real-world potential in wearables, even though many are most likely years away from being what we want them to be.
Take smartwatches, which are already available from brands including LG, Motorola and Sony. They’re good at pushing information and alerts from your calendar to your wrist, where it’s easily glanced.
The wrinkle, said James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, is that most smartwatches are clunky and impersonal. They cannot pinpoint where you are or what you want, so the information they provide is not game-changing.
“A traveler needs that friend that’s sitting on their wrist that says, ‘I know you, I know what you like,’” he said. “That’s the kind of thing that Apple can do.”
But let’s get to what will actually be available early next year when the Apple Watch comes to market. One of the biggest boons for travelers involves maps and GPS: Walk through a city and the watch can deliver different vibrations to your wrist to indicate whether you should turn left or right, so you don’t have to wander the streets peering at a tiny device (or be a good map-reader) to know which way to go.
“It’s like having this invisible guide with you,” Kevin Lynch, vice president for technology at Apple, said during the news conference.
And some travelers will like that the Apple Watch has Apple Pay, a new mobile system that allows you to pay at the registers of places as varied as McDonald’s and Walt Disney World. Until the system is ubiquitous, I’ll be carrying my wallet. I’ll also be carrying my iPhone because, well, you must in order to use all the features of the Apple Watch - and that’s a real drawback for travelers who aim to carry fewer, not more, devices.
WAYS TO GO
So far, wearables haven’t exactly taken off. And, for what they cost, they’re not always practical for the average traveler. Google Glass is US$1,500, while the Apple Watch starts at US$349 and you have to have an iPhone 5 or higher for it to work. Ditto for the Samsung Gear 2 smartwatch, which is about US$300 on Samsung.com and requires that you own a Samsung phone or tablet.
“Nearly 4 in 10 travelers can see a benefit of using wearables when they are traveling,” said Henry H. Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst with Atmosphere Research Group. To attract more of them, he said the devices should be easy to use: The typical American traveler is about 41 years old, not 21, according to Harteveldt. And if the wearable is a smartwatch, it should look inconspicuous, if not beautiful. “It would have to be something that doesn’t make me look like an extra on the set of an alien movie,” he said.
Apple tackled that concern, offering an array of watch faces and bands, including leather and stainless steel mesh. “It’s as much about personal technology as it is about style and taste,” Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said at the news conference. Though for those of us with fashionable watches that merely tell time, the Apple Watch presents a problem. There’s only so much wrist real estate.
Only time will tell if wearables become our second skins. “This is not going to be an overnight story,” Harteveldt said.
That’s what makes it exciting. And maybe a little scary. As Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president for design, put it in a video during the news conference: “We’re now at a compelling beginning.”
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
RSS