Future Phones Will be Wearable
Do you know where is you phone now? How many times that you look for your phone in a day? It is at least 5 times per day for me. That is I spend a lot of time just looking for my phone daily. People use phones in order to make their life easier and more fun. Looking for phones multiple times in a day is a waste of time and not fun. I believe phones will be wearable devices in the future.
Being a wearable device is more convenient for people to use without making a extra effort to hold it or looking for it before usage. If you are the kind of people heavily relying on glasses, how many times that you look for your glasses in a day? I am nearsighted and heavily rely on glasses. I only look for my glasses at most twice or three times in a day, because I am always wearing them except sleep time. If wearable phones can maintain almost all the functionalities of today’s phones, being more portable and remain almost the same price, customers will swift from today’s phones to wearable phones.
Using the first principles perspective, wearable phones has the same components as today’s phones. Wearable phones will be made of CPUs, GPUs, sensors and metal containers, all of which is pretty cheap, and it is possible to make phones wearable with the same cost.
Consumers want wearable phones but they don’t have an idea what wearable phones will look like. Consumers even cannot imagine which part of bodies wearable phones will be attached to.
According to Gemperle’s research, the general areas they have found to be the most unobtrusive for wearable objects are: (a) collar area, (b) rear of the upper arm, © forearm, (d)rear, side, and front ribcage, (e) waist and hips, (f) thigh, (g) shin, and (h) top of the foot[1]. I think I can role out (b) rear of the upper arm, © forearm, (f) thigh, (g) shin, and (h) top of the foot, because these are parts of the body that is constantly moving and when people use phones, they have to stare at the content. Moving content make it hard to stare at. What’s more, if phones are changed to devices that can be worn on the bodies, it have to be lighter than today’s phones.
Even though I have a feeling where wearable phones can be attached to in the future, it is still hard to imagine what wearable phones look like with same functionalities as today’s phone and do not bother people in their daily life.
Speaking of wearable phones, you now may be thinking about google glasses which didn’t really gain popularity in the past. Google glasses is the most famous wearable devices that have similar functionalities as phones. Google glasses can be used to take phone calls, take video calls, surf the Internet, take pictures, receive and send emails and etc. However, google stopped selling google glasses to Individuals. The reasons why it didn’t gain popularity in the past is as follows. Firstly, with the price tag of 1500 US dollars, it is much more expensive than most of smart phones in the markets. Secondly, it do not support many applications as Android or iOS smart phones. Thirdly, it is more distractive than smart phones, because it is right before people’s eyes when people are using them.
If wearable phones overcome google glasses’s drawbacks, that is if wearable phones become affordable and support as many applications as smart phones today without being too distractive, consumers will prefer wearable phones to today’s smart phones for their convenience.
Reference:
[1] Gemperle, F., Kasabach, C., Stivoric, J., Bauer, M., Martin, R. Design for Wearability.
In Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Wearable Computers. Pittsburgh, PA, October, 1998.
