Victoria Turk yawns at the hype of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), singling out one of this year’s buzzy gadgets, an app-enabled toothbrush:
CES always seems to bring out these sort of “wow look, a random everyday object—but connected!” kind of products, and they inevitably get a disproportionate amount of hype. Remember the HAPIfork from last year? The “smart fork” that measures how fast you eat ended up plastered across the media as if it were the greatest invention since the internet. What good is your smartphone anyway, if it won’t wirelessly connect with your silverware? Or, indeed, your toothbrush? …
I’d almost guarantee that you won’t see many people using “connected” toothbrushes anytime soon. I’ve written before about how calling something “smart” doesn’t automatically make it so, and I’m afraid the toothbrush could be a victim to that mindset. While the company claims in their promo video that “Kolibree helps you outsmart your dentist,” the truth is that it doesn’t do much more than you could with a regular toothbrush, a stopwatch, and maybe a mirror. Or alternatively, just that common sense you’ve hopefully gained after decades of brushing practice.
Also noting the proliferation of wearable technology at CES, Leonid Bershidsky wonders when, or whether, someone will develop this market’s “killer app”:
The smartphone market took about 10 years to get to the point where consumers could make sense of what was on offer. Now there’s just Android and Apple’s iOS. If you want to be generous, there’s also Windows Phone, which Microsoft says is outselling Apple in a number of countries but which still has less than 4 percent market share. All the platforms offer a more or less identical list of functions and plenty of apps.
The wearable market offers no such clarity and standardization. “We expect every smartwatch provider to build their own app store, and consumers to experience a lawless jungle by 2015,” the Finnish wearable software company Koru, headed by Nokia Lifeblog creator Christian Lindholm, predicted in a December presentation. It is still an open question what a wearable device should really do. Is it OK simply to tell time and interact with a smartphone, showing messages and push notifications on a smaller but more accessible screen and using voice commands to manage the phone? Or should it also have the functions of a fitness band, tracking workouts, counting calories and analyzing sleep patterns? Does a person need a watch and a wristband?
The Dish 