When I first met the Metawatch — possibly the most revolutionary and disruptive device since the mobile phone — I fell in love.
What’s Metawatch? Metawatch is a handsome timepiece (analog and digital versions are available from the Texas Instruments Store) that receives alerts and notifications from your mobile phone over Bluetooth –providing at-a-glance awareness of what’s happening on the phone.
Why Metawatch? If you’re an average smartphone user, you check your phone 34 times per day, according to a July 2010 study from Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. “Checking behavior” increases when rewards such as an email, text message, or shopping offer is waiting on the phone.
Besides being interruptive, checking notifications on a smartphone is a pain:
- touch to wake
- swipe to unlock
- view notifications
- open notifications with swipe
- then tap a specific event.
Checking notifications this way engages both hands: one to hold the phone, the other to touch it. So you can’t really do anything else while you’re at it. Metawatch provides “Hands Freedom” by providing glanceable information so you can quickly decide whether you need to stop what you’re doing and pick up the phone. Proclaiming “Glance is the new touch” on its website, Metawatch.org’s goal is to “simplify how we live within this connected world.”
Learn more about the Metawatch and what creative mobile designers are cooking up to exploit its many charms in my March/April 2012 column in Connected World Magazine: A New World With Metawatch
