Things few know about smartwatches

I’ve worked for an Android smartwatch company, here’s some things people don’t generally know. Two years passed since then, so I may be a bit out of date, but I doubt I will be much off, as the smartwatch technology has hardly improved since then.

The GPS accuracy is awful

The watch is an obnoxious device when it comes to placing antennas: too close to other components, literally on top of them, and below a screen. Even sweat can affect the GPS signal.

If you feel like your smartwatch has great GPS reception, there’s algorithms to improve accuracy — or rather, to make it look accurate. The worse the reception, the more aggressive this algorithm is.

The best GPS watches have the antenna as a separate module on the side of the watch, integrated in the wristband and poking out of it, like the TomTom smartwatches.

Batteries can’t be more powerful

We used to buy pricey batteries for our prototypes, likely more powerful than what would enter in production, and slightly oversized. If I remember correctly, we reached monstrous 600mAh within a smartwatch, enough to run a Nokia 3310 for over a week.

There was nothing better available on the market. The race to longer life with smartwatches is therefore all about creating hardware and software that consumes less battery.

Furthermore, most of these batteries looked awful, coated in silver with some yellow tape around them. Google “smartwatch battery” to know what I’m talking about as I don’t have any license to show such image. The production means improved and now there’s standard sized batteries in the common dark gray plastic for the pricier devices, but as far as the Sony SmartWatch 1, such weren’t common neither wanted as they squeezed a bit better into the tiny bodies.

There’s usually two processors in the smartwatch

A powerful, multi-core one is for running the full operating system. This one gets disabled as soon as the watch reaches a standby state and is awaken in set intervals (every minute if the display needs the clock to be updated) or when the user performs an action on the device.

The second processor is a super low energy consumption one, used to keep track of sensor data to store it in memory. Once the memory is full, the main processor is activated to process the data or store it in the flash memory.

This means that the device has to support CPU switching and have lots of functionality written at the firmware level for the low energy consumption CPU. This causes a lot of overhead in development.

They’re very hard to make water resistant

Keeping size compact and solid while making the device water resistant requires insane amounts of research, and investments. These items do need buttons as they’re impossible to action with water splashed on the screen, and buttons are very troublesome as the mechanics behind them will usually let water in.

Companies wouldn’t trust their device therefore they’re always only “splash resistant”, even though the latest Apple Watch has a swimming app. Of course, Apple has enough money to handle the research and development of a waterproof watch — with that price tag.

The motherboard (PCB) on Android Wear devices is mostly the same across common models

You may get different screens, radio modules and speakers, but most of the components of the PCB appeared to be almost the same across all models of each generation. It is a quite boring environment for such an experimental field.

Smartwatches are a terrible, yet fun idea

I am still in awe for smartwatches: they can do a whole lot if you are a developer. They’re full operating systems running on your wrist, with a few energy consumption limitations.

I’m amazed the technology went so far for a product that didn’t really become popular, to the point years can pass between iterations. The thirst for a futuristic World is strong, but we’re only adding complexity to our lives by using smartwatches. It is great to add statistics to our activities and micromanage our exercise, but smartwatches aren’t discreet enough neither perform as well as we’d like them to.

Some argue that a smartwatch should be used to enhance experiences rather than to make things simpler, and I can see plenty of situations in workplaces where a well placed app can make the difference. Yet, even for a company, a smartwatch system gets in the way and becomes obsolete very fast.

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