Declaring Independence From Terrible Wearables

After a day of reflecting upon the nature of independence in all its manifestations (and eating hot dogs and falling down stairs), I’ve determined that, in the spirit of the holiday, I would declare myself free of terrible wearables.

And no, I’m not talking about Apple Watch. I still have lots of hope for my favorite love-hate platform. Instead, I’m talking about all the garbage gimmicks that other companies are trying to test out in the hopes of somehow grabbing an ant-carried crumb of the Apple Watch pie. You know, stuff like this:

Or, if you prefer glamor shots backed by a more appropriate metal soundtrack:

The idea with this thing — called the Lenovo Magic View — is to meld the dying (albeit interesting) Google Glass display technology with the world’s more popular kind of wearable, so your second screen can have its own second screen.

Delightfully meta, this monstrosity seems fueled by the weird (perhaps cultural) notion that a smartwatch face itself is not ideal for viewing private things like personal videos and photographs where any passerby might see them (you know, since the thing is so enormous that most folks presumably wouldn’t be able to look away). Of course, it is just a concept, and it’s almost certain to never find its way to American shores — if it’s ever actually commercialized at all.

Perhaps Lenovo can sell this absurd thing to the likes of Montblanc and IWC for their equally non-starting smartstraps, although even there, I find the actual use case of holding it up to your eyeball to be a comically awkward deal-breaker.

The whole thing kind of reminds me of when I was a little kid and we got our school portraits embedded inside of these keychain viewers.

I wonder if the Magic View will work when looked upon with the teary eye of nostalgia.

Or uproarious laughter.