When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, he first teased that he was releasing 3 devices:
- A widescreen iPod with touch controls (huge applause)
- A revolutionary mobile phone (HUGE raucous applause)
- A breakthrough Internet communications device (tepid, confused applause)
But what drives iPhone growth and usage today? It's the third one, BY FAR. Heck the whole concept of "an iPod" has been taken over by streaming music services, which fit firmly into bucket #3.
So it's possible--I would say likely--that the true value of a smartwatch is not yet fully understood by us today.
Based on where Apple is teasing their efforts, I would guess it's some combination of:
- Personal health monitoring, and eventual connection to your doctors and specialists and researchers.
- Authentication, configuration, and activation of ambient computing. Basically--the key and control panel to everything around you. You get in a car and it sets the seat, drive controls, thermostat, etc. to your preferences--which are stored in your smartwatch. Same thing at home. You sit down at your computer and it unlocks and decrypts. You tap your watch on a register to pay. You tap your watch on the subway gate to get on. Etc.
In fact with Watch you are doing them with your phone, but using a wrist terminal as an accessory.
That's not a bad thing - harder to steal - etc, but it's not quite a must-have USP.
No matter how good it is, a device in a watch form factor can't provide THAT much in the way of utility, so it needs to be as hassle-free as possible in order to be a net benefit to its wearer. I think in this regard the early Pebble smartwatches were perfectly pitched.
Sadly Pebble decided to chase the Android / Apple Watch market instead of refining their niche, with predictably poor results.
Wearing a watch is a habit I've had for many years, and still the first thing I do when I wake up is wind it up, and put it on.
There are times when I check the time on my computer, or my mobile, but generally my watch is my first point of call.
Don't get me wrong, I understand them as a viable product and why a lot of people like them, but the demand for them was wildly overblown.
Of everyone I know, only one or two people have one, and it's not because of price. If you're a huge fitness nut, deal with an enormous number of messages, or just plain like the gimmick, they're great. But otherwise they really don't offer much that offsets the cost, need to charge the things on a daily basis, and general hassle of having yet another electronic device to keep track of.