The design of Samsung’s new smart watch suggests that the company has yet to answer the fundamental question of what a smart watch is for. But Dallas, Texas-based PHTL seems to have answered that question. In PHTL’s vision, articulated in the company’s promotional video for its forthcoming HOT Watch, the purpose of a smart watch is to keep your expensive and increasingly bulky smartphone in your pocket by allowing you to make calls from your wrist. Samsung’s Gear is also supposed to have this feature, but reviewers report that the Gear’s speaker is too quiet to make phone calls a realistic endeavor outside of quiet environments. PHTL appears to have solved this issue in a unique way.
The design of Samsung’s new smart watch suggests that the company has yet to answer the fundamental question of what a smart watch is for. But Dallas, Texas-based PHTL seems to have answered that question. In PHTL’s vision, articulated in the company’s promotional video for its forthcoming HOT Watch, the purpose of a smart watch is to keep your expensive and increasingly bulky smartphone in your pocket by allowing you to make calls from your wrist. Samsung’s Gear is also supposed to have this feature, but reviewers report that the Gear’s speaker is too quiet to make phone calls a realistic endeavor outside of quiet environments. PHTL appears to have solved this issue in a unique way.
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HOT stands for “hands-on talk. It’s the company’s name for the watch’s “biomechanics solution,” to solve the problem of bad phone reception via the tiny speaker in the wrist-band of a watch. According to PHTL, HOT Watch uses a directional speaker that shoots sounds up the forearm, which is then bounced into a person’s ear by his or her cupped hand. Reviewers report that calls on the HOT Watch sound as if as if the other person’s voice is coming from just below the wearer’s head—an “unsettling” but also “exciting” experience that works even in noisy environments.
PHTL’s HOT Watch is closing out a (successful) round of crowd-funding on Kickstarter, but a number of reviewers have already gotten their hands on the device. Here’s what differentiates the HOT Watch:
In some ways, the HOT Watch is a less ambitious watch than Samsung’s Galaxy Gear. But in as much as good design is also about subtraction, that could make it the more successful, or at least more emulated, gadget.
