It's almost even worse than that: I don't care much about fashion, and I'm a big geek, but I still kinda judge the few of my friends and colleagues I see wearing smart watches. Watches have transitioned so strongly from "utility" to "fashion" with the rise of smart watches that anything that doesn't clearly look like it's intended to be a fashion accessory first or "ironic" and retro (like a cheap, low end, dumb digital watch) very easily ends up looking out of place and try-hard.
It's like my mind goes "No! you're not that important!" whenever I see someone receive a notification on one - it feels like it's a sign of obsession of self-importance that just steps over the line into caricature.
The difficult, of course, is that cellphones felt like that too - when I got my first cell phone in the mid 90's, it made me feel like now we were "properly doing business", while at the same time certain people definitively were judging.
So it's hard to tell if this is just because it's new, and whether - if it changes - it will change because companies bring out models that satisfies the fashion conscious, or if it will become more acceptable to wear a watch that looks utilitarian again.
I pretty much can't live without my Pebble; going back to getting notifications on my phone seems like a big step backwards.
[0] https://www.fossil.com/us/en/wearable-technology.html?gclid=...
I don't mean to disparage the company, but in the watch world a Fossil (or Timex, Nixon, Citizen) will never be worth a glance. This is a market where low-end examples cost as much as a Honda.
said no one ever.
I don't own one, but the pebble round looks like it could pass as a 'regualar' watch.
Same thing for the moto 360 and other android smartwatches.
Actually, Android smartwatches are interesting since there are already quite a few.
It seems to me that more and more Android smartwatches look like regular watches.
IMO, they still miss a killer app that will make them truly useful. Or maybe smartwatches are just not for me.
Right now, I am wearing an automatic (dumb) watch. It is just a fashion accessory that happens to tell what time it is.
Yet I have no desire to buy a bulky Apple Watch with its short battery life and a bunch of features I'll never use.
From what I can tell, outside of the extremely tech-centric realms of society, smartwatches like pebble will not find any success.
Watches are both a utility device, as well as a fashion accessory. For most people, it has become mostly a fashion accessory first, a utility device second. Pebbles really don't look fashionable to most people, both on style, and on brand perception. People will put up with a bit of questionable styling if the brand signaling is good enough, but the reality is, the vast majority of people will not recognize a pebble, and instead will just see a not very stylish device on your wrist. As a fashion accessory, the pebble fails incredibly, and to build a scalable standalone watch company around watches which don't pass as fashion accessories is just a recipe for failure. Even the pebble steel isn't good enough.
So while people claim that the idea is good, the product is good, my opinion is that the product fails to do what most consumers actually need it to do. Sure, it had a big presence on paper because it was one of the first to bring the concept of smart watches to many people on kickstarter, but like that cooler which had a boom box, charging ports, and a blender, sometimes what gets people excited when they first see an idea online, doesn't actually translate to a product that fits their actual needs.
I think this may be why almost all the smartwatches are transitioning to fitness tracking as the main feature - the idea of what a fitness tracker is, looks like, and signals is very different from a smartwatch. Additionally, it's helpful that fitness tracking is actually a utility that generally can't be done well in other devices (smartphones).