Note – This isn’t one of those anti-technology ‘wah our smartphones control our lives and are making us anti-social’ type of rants.
The Apple watch, one of the few images that showed it actually looking like a stylish, desirable device.
With Apple’s announcement of their watch now out there, the main smartwatches/wearables for the next year or so have all be shown in some detail, it just remains for consumers to make their own decisions.
Personally, I feel like we’re a long way off a usable, desirable smartwatch. There’s a gap in between what we hope our smart watches will be capable off and what they currently can do.
Let’s start with the function of a smartwatch, what exactly should it be able to do? It’s clear from the form factor a smartwatch should not be a content creation or consumption device. It should exist solely to show you glanceable information. You don’t want to be stuck looking at a tiny screen, therefore the information presented on it should avoid anything that has the user looking at the screen for anything longer than a few seconds. Reading a lengthy email on a tiny screen would be irritating, but a simple sms is absolutely fine. These are the important distinctions that need to be made when considering software.
Apple showed good examples of this glanceable information in the keynote, maps, music and text replies are all perfect for the watch form factor. Both Google and Apple seem to understand this – for the most part. Apple showed off their photos on the screen, this is slightly worrying as it makes pretty much no sense. If you want to look at your photos, surely you’d just get out your phone with it’s big, high definition display and use that? Especially so when showing other people. This photo demonstration was also used to show of the capabilities of the ‘crown’. A small rotary device you use to interact with the watch that raises it’s own problems.
Apple may have cancelled the beloved iPod classic but an archaic part of its heritage has made it into the apple watch, the click wheel. I understand on a fundamental level that putting in the ‘crown’ would automatically liken the apple watch to normal watches, but there’s a reason that normal watches don’t require you to use the crown very often. As an input device, it’s small, annoying and is simply placed too close to your own wrist to avoid being awkward to use. I feel like any sort of touch gesture, no matter how small the screen, would be better than this. Perhaps a swipe with a finger from edge to edge? From the top to the bottom? Even a convoluted gesture system would be miles ahead of this anachronistic implementation.
For the most part, the Moto 360 seems like a great answer to these complaints. Android Wear’s use of cards and simple gestures is clean, useful and tasteful. The watch itself isn’t too bad looking either. It’s just the battery life that fails it. Not lasting a whole day is criminal but even requiring nightly charging using a cable seems like its own irritation. This may seem fussy but carrying around two devices that need to be charged every night is a bit of a pain. Ideally, these devices really should have some sort of wireless charging built in so before I go to bed I can dump my phone and watch onto a surface and not worry about them. Until then, for a device that’s supposed to make my life easier, the first and last memories I have of it in the day are reminders of a fundamental annoyance.
This is all pretty negative stuff, but I do recognize that like every other new product launch things will improve very quickly. If you pick up a first generation iPad now you’re shocked at the weight and bulk of the thing, remember picking up the second version and noticing how much thinner and better constructed it was, and then the newest Air? Similar jumps will be made with smartwatches, and the dream device of something with a couple of days battery, a slim profile and intuitive touch based gesture system is somewhere in the near future. Every new consumer product has its growing pains and wearables are no different; it’s going to be an exciting road ahead.
Discursives 