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I recently had an idea for what some might call a smart watch, but significantly more restrained than the phone-on-your-wrist that most try to be.
- No android or ios or any other big system, just a very simple firmware.
- It would have an e-ink display and show just time, weather, and a notification counter.
- It would be solar powered so hopefully no need to ever charge it "manually".
- Because of this simplicity it would be a more agreeable form factor than some of the thicker options out there currently, not to mention quite a bit cheaper
- It would use one of the various low power communication systems available for devices like this rather than bluetooth. I realize that phones generally not having such a thing built in would be a problem in practice but I'm just brainstorming here
I believe the purpose of a watch, smart or traditional, is to provide access to basic, commonly used information as quickly and effortlessly as possible. You could simply check your phone directly, but perhaps saving those few seconds is a convenience worth having. I think too many of them try to do too much however, and lure you into trying things like reading, typing, etc. that because they are so awkward on such a tiny device, end up taking longer than it would to just use your phone for in the first place, and this is what I've attempted to eliminate here. By doing so, it frees up resources that can improve the device in other ways, such as size, cost, and battery life.
What do you think? Would there be any market for such a thing? Does such a thing perhaps already exist unbeknownst to me? I feel like it would actually do well, provided that hitch about communication with the phone could be resolved.
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These devices did/do exist. Garmin has a solar smartwatch that is only slightly stripped down for 56 day rated batterylife, with a lower power mode that is "unlimited", likewise some early devices went that way instead.
I don't actually think it's all that popular of an option, but certainly there is a niche for it.
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Ah well, that was sounding good up until I saw the price lol that may be why it's not popular
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Yeah, a company called matrix has even less functional watches with endless battery life supposedly, but they are even more expensive (500-800 dollars), and pretty laggy.
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Congratulations! You just found a cubic meter of solid gold! You are now a billionaire and thus more wealthy than 99.997% of the world's population, and well on your way to matching the first percent of Jeff Bezos' net worth. Keep it up!
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Regarding a HDD, in theory, if you had a folder full of many tiny files, and the partition was properly defragmented, they would all be stored contiguously, would they not? And as such, if you were to copy or move the entire folder, despite the fact that technically it contains many tiny files and would thus normally be subject to the terrible random IO performance of HDDs, you could theoretically instead read the entire block of data that represents the contents of the folder sequentially for a massive performance improvement, could you not? If anyone knows better I'd like to hear why this wouldn't be the case, or if it's correct, why such an optimization hasn't been created by now.
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Regardless, wouldn't it make sense to try to keep all files within a folder together?
I could be wrong but as far as I know defragmenting utilities don't do this because it takes longer for arguably no reason. Reading all files in a given folder contiguously isn't a very realistic scenario (if you're doing that often they should probably be a single file or in an archive). Moving all files to be contiguous among each other on the drive would take a lot of time since you may have to copy every single file (plus you may have to sort them to respect folder structure) and it would place a lot of unneeded stress on the platters and heads.
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Perhaps, but I could imagine it being done on the HDD firmware level, or even the OS itself as well. Perhaps it was naïve of me to think folders would be structured like this and thus that it should be common and easy to benefit from it, I can see that now. With that said though, I think such an optimization would be nice. Perhaps the opportunity to use it wouldn't come up often, and perhaps it would only end up applying on a large scale, or by chance on files that seemed to be unrelated, but when and if it could be done it would certainly help.
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I feel like there is an (undeserved) perception of titanium as this super metal that can do anything and is better than anything else. In reality, steel can be as good or better in terms of both hardness and outright strength. What makes titanium special (among other things) is just that it can be as strong as it is while weighing much less than comparable steels. Much like aluminium then, it's stronger per mass but weaker (or at least similar) on an absolute scale.
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Yes and no... it is both underrated and overrated...
To give example... along the right axis, pine wood exhibits a higher specific strength than basically every single metal in existence (except for beta titanium alloys). Balsa wood can have twice the specific strength of the strongest metal alloys around.
But titanium has much better temperature resistances than most steels or inconels (obviously superior to aluminium) and far better dimensional stability, while also being more workable/formable than high chrome iron/nickel alloys... better volumetric strength than any aluminum or magnesium alloy and among the best of conventional alloys (some high entropy alloys challenge things)....
Point is... yes for normal people doing normal things it's overrated, but at the same point there is a reason it's used so incredibly much in the harshest/tightest environments where margins are the smallest to failure.
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