Do we (not) need a watch?

A short reflection around this new area of “smartwatches”: gadgetization of our wrist? Or introduction of a new screen in our digital lives?

Do you remember the iPad in 2010?

I remember my reaction the first time I heard about the new iPad back in 2010: “This will never work! Between my iPhone screen and my laptop, I don’t need any intermediary screens!”.

It took me 4 years to surrender and buy an iPad Mini even though I fell in love with the device a couple of years earlier. I find it so interesting how it only took as little as 2 years to adopt the tablet as one of the screens in our lives.

What place does the watch have?

By combining the practicality of a mobile device with a laptop-like screen, defining the place of the tablet has been quite easy. However this makes me wonder if the iPad would have survived if it hadn’t been “between these two screens”. Do tablets succeed because they opened a whole new way of using a device? Or is it just because of their practicality? They found their use cases in both way, making it enjoyable enough to stay with our hands.

The entrance of a watch into our lives is quite different, as it expands the width of digital environment by adding a new category of screens that is new for us – from the size of the screen to what we will do of it. And this is probably the biggest challenge for the watch: is the proposition strong enough to change the way we interact with our devices to make it essential, or at least enjoyable enough, to stick to our wrist?
For now, it looks like nobody has solved that problem yet and the justification to buy a smartwatch is still very fragile.

I recently read a great article “Notifications Are The Next Platform” written by Anish Achar (@illscience). He highlighted that we are constantly harassed by an ocean of apps making us spend our days checking our phones full of Candy Crush notifications. I think watches represent a great opportunity to enhance the current use of our apps and smartphone; such as a quick dashboard or a good platform for notifications. This way, if my watch helps me get the best, and only the best, out of my phone: Good job watch, you won my heart!

However, I’m quite scared that makers will only see the watch as a “small iPhone on your wrist”. This would certainly guarantee the failure of the watch by making it something that it is not. The watch is a different device, which relies to its own environment and has its own use cases: we just need to explore them!

GoogleGlass failed,
will this happen to the watches?

The success of a watch is not only due to the watch itself. Start-ups, huge companies, product designers and developers, I’m talking to YOU!

We learned recently that Google was shutting down its GoogleGlass program (or at least was resetting it) deploring a low traction from the developer community. This is one of the key elements that watch makers cannot really control. The iPhone did not get successful only because of its usability and its core functionalities, but also because it’s backed up by billions of apps in the AppStore.

And this is why I don’t give a much attention to all the core-functionalities of these watches. For sure, if you can pay with your watch for a similar price compare to another one, why not? But aren’t we now talking gadgets rather than behaviour changing functionalities? (btw, ApplePay is not available yet in the UK….just saying….).

I previously mentioned the fact that I believe that watches represent a great way to extend and improve the way we are interacting with our apps. A week after its launch, I am quite pleased to see applications that are now taking a great advantage of this new device such as Uber or even Maps. Buzz when you have to turn and show the maps on your wrist so you don’t have to carry your iPhone all the time, I like that!

However, despite my excitement about this potential “new era” or at least “new screen”, I’m still asking myself these hard questions:

Why does my wrist look so empty now
while I haven’t been wearing watches for 10 years?

Do we “really” need a watch?

That’s it!

Hope you liked reading my first Medium post (EVER!), please hit recommend if you did! Hit me up on Twitter via @Piersayshello if you want to chat more. I’ll definitely post some more thoughts in the coming weeks! There are so many things to talk about! Cheers for reading!