What would be the killer app for a smartwatch from a hacker/techie perspective? Because I'm still struggling to see any realistic use case for myself.
Being able to glance at my wrist and see if I need to get my phone out is pretty nice. I don't try to be inconspicuous in meetings or anything, but when I'm doing something, or walking down the street, etc., it's nice to be able to decide if I need to stop and handle it (like a call from my wife or the daycare), or can ignore it, like an email from a newsletter.
And with 2FA everywhere, it's nice to have a standalone token generator that I can wear. The one on my pebble is strictly offline operation (doesn't need the phone connected), which means it's even useful if I break/loose my phone or the battery's dead or something.
Music control is pretty cool as well. But mostly for things like when I'm doing the dishes, swimming in the pool/at the beach, or in the shower. My Pebble is fully waterproof, so I only take it off to charge every few days. So I can stream music from my phone to a bluetooth speaker, and control it without needing to handle my phone.
For it to be usable, it should not require sight and higher typing speeds should be achievable by training. This rules out virtual querty keyboards and predictive suggestions. I think glyph recognition would be usable, but also other gesture systems would work if they don't demand supervision by sight.
Although I think a better input method would be voice (like the GoPro cameras) for most use cases. "Watch, send text to Mom...." Morse Code is just too slow and most humans can no longer send or copy it. It should be the input method of last resort.
Maybe you could compensate a bit with some haptic feedback.
Downside is that it requires training to learn the symbols, and of course without sight or other feedback you don't notice mistakes while doing it (same with keyboards though).
edit: I forgot to mention Minuum. It's quite similar, but compresses all the keys into a single row. Consequently, it doesn't seem to be as accurate.
In reality, I think the author just did it for its own sake:
> I ended up with a free LG Watch Urbane ... I realized that smartwatches were just a fad (for me at least), and this was a device I could experiment with.