Once one hits a certain age, it is inevitable that you will
be asked some lifestyle questions by your doctor: Do you smoke? Do you drink
(alcohol) and if so, how much? The patient who says they smoke the occasional
cigarette and drinks a couple of pints a couple of times a week will probably
have his doctor reckoning that they are a twenty-a-day man who has at least four
pints every day, the conventional wisdom being that we all underestimate - or,
to put more bluntly - lie about such things.
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| William Hague claimed he used to drink 14 pints a day...no one believed him. |
Equally, how accurate is the answer you give to the question
about how much exercise you take? If you play sport, go to the gym or take
exercise classes, the question should be fairly easy to answer, but if - like
me - you do none of these things, how do you answer? There's a good chance you
will wildly over - or under - estimate. These days the major form of exercise I
take is walking, and when I decide that I'm going to take a walk of a decent
length I will use the Map My Walk app on my phone, so I know how long were the
walks I did from Herne Bay to Margate (12 miles) and Romford to Tilbury (16
miles - see my blog The Long Walk To Tilbury).
But on days when I just walk to the shops or into town I have only a rough idea
of how far I have walked, which is why I decided to buy a Fitbit activity
tracker. I did consider buying one a while ago, but reckoned it was a bit of a
gimmick for someone like me who does not exercise seriously, but having taken
the plunge, I am impressed. In the eight days that I've had it, I've clocked up
over 41 miles; but a lot of it is just pootling round the house or the
supermarket, you might say, except that those walks include 341 'very active'
minutes and 143 flights of stairs climbed, and include one day where I walked
ten miles and two where I did seven. And now that I have an idea of how far I
walk on a normal day, I can make sure I keep up the regime.
A word of caution however: research by the National
University of Ireland in Galway suggests that these activity trackers can
register false positives, and it is true that some mornings I wake to find that
my Fitbit has registered more steps than can be accounted for by a nocturnal
trip to the bathroom, but as the makers of the Fitbit say, their trackers ‘are
not intended to be scientific or medical devices,' rather they monitor ‘overall
health and fitness trends.’ On the whole, my Fitbit is giving me a pretty good
indication of how much exercise I'm getting and is a darn sight more accurate
than any estimates I might otherwise have been able to make. So despite any
misgiving I might initially have had, at the moment I'll rate the Fitbit as a
useful gadget rather than a gimmick.
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| What is the point of an internet enabled fridge? |
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| I'll just leave this here, you can make up your own jokes. |
There are, however plenty of gimmicky devices available, particularly
among the Internet of Things. I cannot ever see the day dawning when I decide I
need an internet enabled fridge - I'll rely on my own five senses to decide
whether I need to buy more orange juice or if that bacon is past its best,
thank you. And when I read stories like the one that appeared on the BBC
website in 2014 - 'Fridge sends spam emails as attack hits smart gadgets'[1]
- it makes me want one even less. I'm
sure there's a joke there about spam, but I can't be bothered to think one up.
But if an internet enabled fridge might conceivably have its uses, I truly
cannot think of any reason why anyone would want a wi-fi kettle. Last year The
Guardian reported that ' Data specialist Mark Rittman spent an entire day
attempting to set up his new appliance so that it would boil on command.'
Frankly, if you want a gadget to avoid having to go switch the kettle on and
wait for it to boil, get a Quooker: they may be expensive, but I guarantee they
are a lot less frustrating.
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| Quooker's mean instant boiling water, so where's the need for a Wi-fi kettle? |
Some gadgets come and go, often replaced by superior
alternatives. The video recorder and the fax machine have been supplanted by
hard disk drive recorders and -largely -by email respectively, but both had
reasonably long and useful periods of use. Not so the 3D television, the first
of which was produced in 1935, although it wasn't until 2010 that they became
popular - albeit not that popular.
When we bought our last TV in 2012, 3D capability was a major selling point as
far as the retailers were concerned, although personally I felt that rather
than making the viewing experience more life-like, it was rather unnatural, and
it seems I was not alone as Sky TV dropped their 3D output and manufacturers
like Sony, LG and Samsung have now largely stopped making sets with this functionality.
History will record the 3D television as a gimmick.
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| Putting a digital watch in every conceivable device was popular during the 1980's |
Years ago the Innovations
catalogue was a treasure trove of gadgets - most were useless and many combined
two gadgets in one: adding a watch to items like pens and far more unlikely
devices was a staple of it. Pocket handwarmers, revolving wine racks and
storage units for shoes and CD's (sometimes combined), and caddies for your
remote controls were among the hundreds of essential items the magazine
advertised, the majority of which turned out to be a waste of space and money -
somehow they seemed much more useful when seen on the pages of the catalogue
than they turned out to be in reality.
The kitchen is where you will find the sharpest contrast
between the useful and the useless - or, if not useless, annoying. We have a
Vitamix blender (see The Scariest Domestic Appliance In The World)
which I thought might turn out to be a gimmick, but which we have used virtually
every day since we bought it, but we also used to have a worktop grill like the
ones that go under the George Foreman brand (I can't remember now what make ours
was). It was such a faff to use and to clean that we binned it, although given
the popularity of the Foreman ones, I imagine a lot of people would swear by
them.
Ultimately, what to one man is a gimmicky disappointment is
to another an indispensible gadget, and at the moment my Fitbit falls in that
second category. Time will tell how long that lasts.
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