Wearables: Google repeats its strategy
Google has just announced plans to adapt Android to its wearables range, called, appropriately enough, Android Wear. To do so, the company will be repeating the same simple but effective strategy that has allowed it to dominate the smartphone market: creating an open platform so that manufacturers can develop products for it.
The company has announced that it is working with manufacturers of chips, electronic consumer goods, and luxury brands to use the Android platform on our wearable devices, on our wrist, or wherever it next occurs to somebody to attach them to our bodies. A presentation video shows a few smartwatch models, a category that we have seen is going to be subject to fierce competition, and managed via an interface that will likely be dominated by Google Now, and that can be controlled at any time by voice.
For the moment, the competition has largely come in the shape of emerging brands such as Pebble, which are following a strategy based on creating devices with long battery life (up to five or six days) by using electronic ink screens, compared to those created by the bigger brands such as Sony, Qualcomm, Samsung, and others, that all require daily charging, and which in some cases have been returned in large numbers by customers who are not happy at the idea of returning home at the end of the day with a blank watch.
Meanwhile, the two biggest players, Apple and Google, are keeping quiet. We have seen a few indicators that suggest that the Apple device would set itself apart by including a number of variables to do with the measured self, gauging health, exercise, and sleep parameters, but as ever, with a brand that has become a byword for secrecy, there is much confusion and very little clarity. Its wait and see approach has so far served it well, and allowed it to change the game more than once.
How many MP3 players were there on the market before the iPod came along? How many cellphones before the iPhone? And what happened after they appeared? Will Apple be able to pull off the same trick with its iWatch?
The key to all this is clearly battery life, which needs to be extended so that users can at least wear their smartwatch all day, even very long days. It seems that one thing is assuming that a smartwatch will be a device that requires overnight charging every day, as we now do with smartphones, and something else is accepting your device is out of the game by mid-afternoon when you look down at it to see that it has died on you.
So while Apple is looking for a new category to reinvent, Google will press ahead with its open-access ecosystem strategy, encouraging competition between manufacturers, and developing the same kind of platform that has brought it such excellent results for its smartphone. In the middle are the likes of Pebble, which have shown themselves able—with reasonable success, bearing in mind their size—to exploit the pioneer effect, and that will try to hold onto their advantage in a market that, in the not-too-distant future, will be coming to a huge numbers of users’ wrists…
(En español, aquí)
