Burrito West Blog

So England voted to leave the EU and it's a gong show over there now. Trump is crazy and a substantial number of people are willing to vote for him.  It's weird times.

But I'm not here to write about that, I'm here to write about my new gadget. Because, priorities. And the need to focus on things that bring happiness not head-explodingness.

For a while now I've been waiting for the smart wearable tech to mature enough to provide an attractive, functional, affordable solution to the fact that my cellphone is always in my bag and I never manage to hear it ring/ding. This, being a problem particular to women, went unaddressed by the male-dominated tech industry for ages. Then products like Ringly came along - jewelry connected to your phone via bluetooth that flash an led or vibrate to let you know your phone is ringing or you got a text.

I held off buying these early products because they were expensive and reportedly buggy.  But it was taking ages for anything reasonable to come along. Cuff, for example was advertised in 2014, took a ton of pre-orders and then went under without delivering anything. It was really frustrating. We could make GIANT smart watches that don't fit on smaller wrists but we can't make a small, simple, dodad with basic notifications? I would get pretty annoyed every time I googled smart jewelry to find if there was a new product only to see nothing had advanced.

Then I went on a cruise with a friend who had a FitBit Alta. She was receiving text and phone call notifications via her fitness monitor. And, the tiny display screen would even show her who was calling/texting so she could decide whether or not to pull out her phone.  I got home and basically went out and bought one right away (on sale, yay!).

I'm pretty thrilled. It's basically a watch that provides this connectivity for me and tracks my fitness too. I think FitBit is mis-advertising it, actually. They advertise it as a fitness monitor and down near the bottom of the list of features they say it does phone notifications. They should be singing that from the rooftops.

So, here I am doing it for them. I can't believe how long it has taken to solve this problem, and even the products that do solve the problem don't seem to realize what a powerful thing they've done. Other fitness monitors do phone notifications too - the new Misfit Shine doesn't have a display but flashes leds and is pretty.

I feel like I should thank all the people who are crazy into fitness tracking for making these products a worthwhile place for companies to innovate. Otherwise, if left to the smart jewelry makers, I'd still be waiting!