Just a few years ago wearable tech
was seen as a passing gimmick that wasn’t technically feasible, useful, or
appealing to the general consumer. Smart watches and the like were seen as
geeky tech for geeky people. A few
years ago those doubters were right, but the advancement of battery, screen and
processor tech that has allowed us to build thinner more attractive smart
phones has also had an equally positive impact on the Smart Watch Market.
Let us take a look at the (brief) history of smart
watches.
When you think early 2000’s mobile
tech what comes to mind? I don’t know about you but Palm OS comes to my mind. In
2003 Fossil released a wrist worn PDA (Read: Smart Watch) that retailed for
$250- the same price manufactures are aiming for today. Fossil’s hardware ran
Palm OS 4.1.2 on a Motorola Dragonball Super VZ clocked at a whopping 66 MZ.
The device sported a grand total of 8 MB of RAM and 4 MB of flash memory. It
did have a touch screen but the display was a 16 level greyscale. Wired.com
called Fossil’s effort a “Wrist-Top Revolution” and the early reviews were very positive for a product that never got off the
ground.
In 2006 Microsoft took a crack at
the game and it was called the “Smart Personal Objects Technology” or Spot
Initiative. The watch was touted for its ability to wake you up to your
favorite songs or connect to the local FM radio waves in the US. Like most
early smart watches it never took off due to its lack of decent battery life,
poor screen and overall lack of functionality.
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| Samsung's "WatchPhone" |
Jump to 2009 and Samsung comes in
with an unusual effort to try to crack the wearable market, the S9110. The Korean
Giant unveiled a Watch-phone, which is exactly what it sounds like, a phone on
your wrist; keep in mind this was pre-Galaxy S Samsung. It was marketed as
being the thinnest watch-phone on the market, though I can’t believe there was
much competition, at just 12mm thin; by comparison, the iPhone 4 was just less
than 10mm.
Once we hit the current decade the
competition really starts to heat up. People even used a device that wasn’tsupposed to be a smartwatch as such . No company’s efforts had come to fruition, but that wasn’t for a lack of
trying. Sony has already had 3 iterations of their Sony SmartWatch since 2012.
Same goes for Samsung and their family of Gear watches. 2013 was supposed to be
“the year of the smartwatch” .
Although the tech was there to make a viable watch, no one had developed a
truly useful platform that would actually improve the user’s life instead of
hinder it. The only company, until recently, that had come close was Pebble-
who released its watch from a Kickstarter campaign .
The second generation steel is a large improvement from the original, but
neither feels like a true smartwatch platform for most people. Don’t get me
wrong, the Pebble was great leap forward in wearable tech and it might still be
the best option out there, but hopefully not for long.
The real game changer came in March
of 2014 when Google announced Android Wear, its solution to the smart watch
question. Android wear is a software platform that borrows heavily from the
Google Now concept which produces ‘cards’ of useful information when Google
thinks you will need it. It ties in perfectly with your Google account and
connects to your Android 4.2 or high device via Bluetooth. Because of this,
Google is betting that the future of smart watches is in them being a companion,
rather than stand-alone, device. Currently there are three devices that take
advantage of the Wear software; the LG G Watch, the Samsung Gear Live and the
Motorola Moto 360. All of these devices definitely feel first generation; even
the Moto 360 with its excellent design could use improvement. Google has built a solid platform that with
some updates and tweaks along with some stellar hardware is poised to break out
into the mainstream next year.
Until recently,
Apple had been silent in the world of wearables. Apple who is known for their
awesome design and user experience seems to have hit another homerun here, but
we’ll have to wait until reviewers actually get ahold of the thing early next
year. An advantage, or disadvantage depending on the way you look at it, that
Google and Apple have is that there is no cross platform compatibility going on
here. An Apple Watch will only work with iOS and Wear Devices with Android.
Smart Watches are
now truly useful and are poised to break into the mainstream next year, but
will they? Google, Apple, LG, Samsung, Motorola and company have an uphill battle
to fight. They have already convinced us to spend hundreds of dollars every few
years in order to be happy, but can they do the same thing for watches? I don’t
see the price going below $200 USD any time soon and without the watches being
able to augment our lives in a useful way the average consumer isn’t going to
buy into it. The idea behind current Android Wear devices is to let you forget
about your that multi-hundred dollar smartphone in your pocket. The watch pulls
all of your notifications right to your wrist and lets you act on them in
limited ways. The functionality is there and it works, but is it worth it just
yet? That’s up to you.
I believe the
answer lies in a separation of hardware and software. Google did the right
thing by not allowing OEM’s to tweak wear in order to give a uniform experience
independent of what device you have. Manufacturers need to focus on building
beautiful hardware while letting Google figure out the backend. Apple is tasked
with both ends, but they have a history of making that work just fine. Regardless,
the next year should be interesting to say the least.
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