rufus-cuffWant to read e-books on your wrist? It might be a better idea to strap your phone to it than to invest in a miniature tablet designed with that purpose in mind.

Engadget has a fairly breathless piece about the Rufus Cuff, a $300 3.2” Android Kit Kat mini-tablet with a strap to secure it to one’s wrist.  The Indiegogo campaign to launch this tablet project took off, to the tune of more than $800,000 in orders (or so the article says; the campaign page itself caps at $491,000, but perhaps that total includes orders received outside the Indiegogo system. Rufus has received inquiries from the retail and hospitality industries for its convenience to use for a number of business-related tasks.

In addition to business tasks, I could see something like the Rufus Cuff being potentially useful for e-reading. It has the smartphone form factor, but would permit you to keep both hands free while you read your e-book, and attend to two-handed tasks without having to risk putting your phone down somewhere and losing or damaging it. But that’s just the thing, when you think about it—why is a 3.2” tablet even necessary for that?

Just go to Amazon and search on “smartphone wrist holder” and you’ll find thousands of results. You could very easily strap the smartphone you already have to your wrist—and goodness knows, plenty of people are already e-reading from that. What’s more, the specs on the Rufus Cuff are fairly low-end. (A 400×240 screen, in this day and age? Really? Odds are good nearly any smartphone has better specs than that!) The device is about three times as thick as your average smartphone, too. One commenter noted that it essentially has the specs of a cheaper-than-cheap $60 OEM tablet, but since you can wear it on your wrist, it costs $300.

So why is something like this even necessary—not to mention, so expensive? Strapping your own phone to your wrist would be cheaper, and possibly more effective, too. But this is something new and different, therefore it must be awesome.

Yeah, right. Save your money—buy a wrist strap for your phone.

1 COMMENT

  1. Chris, your wife must love you very much. You’re so great at saving money. A cheap tablet isn’t the only option. One of the heavily discounted Android cell phones should work as well and the screen is likely to be smaller, which on a wrist is a plus. It won’t look so geeky.

    But take it from someone who has done it, there are downsides to reading on the move. In my case, it wasn’t getting run over. I was walking around Seattle’s Green Lake, which has no cross streets. Nor, if you’re like me, do you worry about the stares. “What, you’re not taking this chance to read?” was my silent response to that. No, the real downside is that the reading while walking is very slow. Between the bouncing up and down and looking up to see where you’re going, I doubt most people can get above 200 wpm.

    A better option is text-to-speech or audiobooks, depending on the availability. For recent audiobooks, check your local library and look for apps that’ll package a CD into an audiobook file for a smartphone. For public domain books, try Librivox.org.

    If you’re really time-conscious, try finding an app that’ll let you speed up the reading. For me, a 1.25x boost is about right. It means I’m less likely to be distracted. Also, I just discovered that Youtube now lets users speed up watching videos. Most benefit from being watched at 1.25x. Some are fine at 1.5x. Click on a Gear-looking icon on the bottom right of picture window and then select speed.

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