The Curious Technologist“It’s objectively the worst product I’ve touched all year.”
Dan Seifert absolutely eviscerates Will.i.am’s “Puls” smartwatch:
I got a chance to use an early production model earlier today. It’s objectively the worst product I’ve touched all year.
The Puls is a stiff cuff that you wear around your wrist. It has a curved touchscreen on its surface and sensors to measure your activity. Instead of Android Wear (or a full version of Android), the Puls runs its own operating system that relies on swipe gestures to navigate. It’s a thick and inflexible device that is not comfortable to wear. In fact, the unit I used didn’t even close around my wrist and needed another spacer to do so.
The screen is small and grainy and the operating system is neither responsive or intuitive. There are a few preinstalled apps for Twitter, Instagram, contacts, and more, and the Puls has a full dialer for making phone calls. It also has a full QWERTY keyboard, which requires two presses to type a single letter (one to zoom in, a second to actually input the letter). It’s unsurprisingly terribly frustrating to use. The Puls’ feels like a Kickstarter concept product that never should have made it to production.
Refreshing to see this kind of pull-no-punches review. At the end of the day, people value tech reviewers for their honest opinion on something. Is this worth buying? Is it a piece of junk? Far too often these veer towards polite, and I’m not sure why. Well, I know why, but that doesn’t actually help anyone — neither the creator nor the buyer.
