I think the reason everybody is working so hard on smart watches is in case somebody else comes up with an actual use case for them, they want to be ready to implement it.
Every declared and hypothetical use for a smartwatch would be better-served with a larger screen. Something this side of a pip-boy, to be sure, but at least twice as wide as the display on the Apple Watch. (Increased internal volume for battery would more than make up for increased screen size.)
If everyone was still wearing watches, trying to slide in on familiarity might make some sense. But watches have been on the decline since even basic cell phones began to spread. I understand you have to make something people are willing to wear. But making it familiar, at a cost to its ability to do everything people might want it for, is a short-sighted mistake.
The biggest benefit for me to get an Apple Watch is so that I don't have to check my phone during meetings, lunches etc when I get a phone call or email. In fact I can see myself using my phone a lot less.
Throw in other benefits e.g. tracking fitness, playing music wirelessly whilst running, opening my car door, navigating whilst in the car (and having it display maps on my head unit using AirPlay), being able to make payments etc and it's definitely useful.
It just plays in well with this notifications based world we live in. It means you can very quickly check a notification and be done with it. With your phone it's a lot more effort and often you can miss the notification anywhere.
Not to get too superior, but these two are MAJOR reasons for wearing a smart watch, and they are completely lost on a HUGE chunk of the crowd here....
Interesting article on the topic: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21646225-smartwatches...
If there were a killer app for a watch, it would be out already. Most people just don't want a crippled computer strapped to their wrist except as a status symbol.
It turned out the iPhone's compelling app was the app itself. Previously people paid $4/month to carriers for crappy junk. For the iPad it was actually browsing, though a lot of other near computer type apps work great on it.
Here's the thing-- whatever the compelling reason is, Apple kept the product in gestation long enough to figure out what it was before releasing it.
All three of these products were in gestation for a long time. People lampooned the iPad before it was released with "why would anyone want a device just to brows the web while on the toilet???".
I don't know what the compelling app is for the watch--- I suspect it's actually being notified by your phone without having to pull your phone out.
But if there isn't a compelling app, then this would be a huge change from Apple. They've been pretty consistent in knowing the killer app, or category, before releasing the product-- even though it's often not obvious to us when we buy the first version.
The only question why did nobody release something before them. Could have been luck. Could have been that they worked on a tablet long before.Could have been Apple's amazing supply chain Could have been some other business reason. But i think it was just a matter of time till someone releasing a tablet.
And btw ,nokia had a device similar to the tablet a few years before the ipad(and even before the iphone), but they didn't made a product of it.
Another factor might be timing. The iPhone, and by extension other smartphones, laid the groundwork for making it socially more acceptable to use these kinds of devices. I vividly recall being a bit embarrassed to pull out my geeky 'PDA' in the dumbphone days, and I felt much less of that when I got the iPad (while none of the people around me had one).
Apps came later, as a differentiating point against other smartphones, not as the value prop of the smartphone as a platform.
Tablets: I think that the doubters have been proven right by history. Sales are way, way down on tablets -- largely because they just aren't that useful.
http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Tablet-Users-Surpass-1-Bill...
That's hardly a sign of non-usefulness.
But of my computing devices (smartphone, tablet, laptop), it's the least essential of my devices, and the one I've paid the least for. It has the narrowest use case. If I had to replace my tablet usage with smartphone usage, well, I wouldn't be perfectly happy, but I'd live.
That is, I think, the story of tablets. Apple convinced a lot of people to try tablets. And, you know, it's not like tablets go out and kill your dog. They're fine. If you've got one, you'll use it every once in a while. They also don't spontaneously combust after one year, so it's hardly a surprise that the total number of "people who own a tablet" is increasing.
But sales are falling because they aren't that useful. They aren't massively more portable than laptops, they aren't massively more useful than smartphones. There is no single thing that they do really, really well that's highly useful to a large share of the population.
I think this is a really illustrative example for what's going to happen with the Apple Watch and the smart watch in general. Apple has a deservedly strong brand, they will get a lot of people to buy the Apple Watch at first. And, you know, having a watch, people will say, "Sure, I use it." But instead of picking up momentum onstoppably, as smartphones did, they'll sort of... languish. There's undeniably a use case for smartwatches, just as there's undeniably a use case for tablets.
It's just not that useful.
Reading anything of length will blow on a phone or laptop.
Perhaps more importantly, I don't think that 80%+ of the population reads in long-form commonly enough to make this a big deal. You can deal with a slightly inconvenient long-form reading experience if you only read long-form four times a year, say.
Finally: e-ink dedicated readers deliver a superior value for a big chunk of the long-form reading out there (not all of it), thus further-narrowing this use-case.
Using the term 'languish' just seems a bit too negative to describe this particular outcome. Tablets are finding (or found) their market, and are doing okay. Smartwatches will probably be a similar kind of thing. Setting the bar for 'success' at smartphone levels seems a bit too high to me.
Not true. The browser was the obvious killer app for the phone, and it would suck dick on a watch.
Why was Blackberry only popular among businessmen then?