What will the Smartwatch really do?
My thoughts and insights on the use cases for the smartwatch!
Most tech critics and visionaries agree to one thing about the consumer electronics industry. And that’s the arrival of the smartwatch is imminent. I personally think smart watch is the most obvious step in the wearable industry. For years, people have paid heavily to buy a few fancy watches, just to look stylish and portray it as a status symbol. And if you think about consumer electronics, off late these too have become a status symbol(all thanks to the great Steve Jobs). Now that all of us agree that the dumb stylish watch should be transformed in insanely sexy smartwatch, it’s time to think to what these things would actually do? Samsung was able to do a decent job with the outside look and feel of their smartwatch. Even the pebble steel looks pretty good.
But both Samsung and Pebble have failed to come up with really compelling use cases for the smart watch. Personally, I feel Samsung has got the vision of the smartwatch entirely wrong. They think it’s gonna be a communication device. A simple extrapolation means that they are expecting phones to be replaced by the watch. Anybody with a decent bit of common sense would understand why this vision is so stupid. We need to understand what the watch does now. The watch for centuries has done a great job of keeping us in the moment by telling us the time and date. So the use cases of the smartwatch would be highly centered around this principle need. It will do an amazing job of tracking things for us and bringing to notice the things that require our immediate attention. These were the basic philosophies on which I put together the following needs that I feel the smartwatch would do a good job of satisfying. Most importantly the smartwatch would be better than any device in doing these tasks
1. Daily Activity Tracking: I have been using an app called Rescue Time and I am in love with the product. It allows me to track what I have been doing all day on any of my devices. At the end of the day it tells me what I did all day and how productive the day was. The only flaw I see right now is that the app is incapable of tracking my activities when I am not using any of my devices. I think it makes obvious sense for Rescue Time to be on the smartwatch. I think through smartwatch it will also be able to do a good job of tracking my health as well. How many times in the day did I loose my temper or how many times in the day did my blood pressure rise above the optimum level. I think the addition of all these would make rescue time the best daily activity tracker app in the world.
2. Handling Important Notifications: Haven’t all of us at some point of time or the other forgotten that medicine we had to take. Or haven’t all of us realized that we missed that important notification from Any.Do about that bill we had to pay. I think the question in all your minds would be that the phone already gives notifications for these. The answer is yes but the phone sends a zillion other notifications. And that’s where the smartwatch will play a key role. It will only show you notifications that require immediate attention from you.
3. Calendar Notifications and Invites: This is another one that I think would be handled pretty well by the smart watch. A lot of times I have been sent meeting invites by my boss in the morning with the meeting scheduled to happen at 10 or 11 in the morning. For any meeting invite that has a short notice, I feel the smartwatch again will do a good job.
4. Cab booking(Uber please take notice): A whole lot of times standing on the street, we have wanted to book a cab. All it takes for us is to send out our location. I think the smartwatch would make it pretty simple for us to do that. One touch and your cab is front of you!
5. Payments: Jack Dorsey and his company Square have been working so hard to make payments seamless. And I think the smartwatch would allow them to take it to the next level. Whether you want to buy a ticket or pay the restaurant bill, all you got to do is enter your pin or password on your watch and you are good to go.
6. Real Time personalization of your environment: The smartwatch would be an extremely personal device. And I think it is the first step to the Internet of things where every thing in and around us behaves in a personalized way for us. It would make it simpler for us to control our environment around us like controlling the temperature of your thermostat in the office or at your home. Or the washing machine reminds you when you are at home that you haven’t washed your clothes since the last week. Again the difference that comes here is the comfort that it brings. The phone sure can do these things but the difference is that the smartwatch will do it better.
It’s been a long post. But I hope you enjoyed it and if you did please recommend this! To stay tuned with more of my thoughts on startups and consumer web, follow me on twitter or my personal blog on tumblr.
