[ghthor]

Despite the poor sales of the spectacles, the hardware itself is actually really well designed and functional, If it wasn't bogged down by being bound to the snapchat app. I assume this is the source of the value tencent is investing in, a hardware design company.

[giobox]

I'd agree there are parts of the Spectacles user experience that were nicely done, but I'd draw the line at "really well designed and functional" as you describe it. Each press of the button only recorded 10 seconds of video up to a max length of just 30 seconds, it could only store about 30 minutes total, the battery could only manage ~15 minutes of recording before dying, transferring HD clips via wifi was pretty awful...

The design, while about as good as we've seen for glasses with a camera strapped to them, still left a lot to be desired. Not everyone is going to want such a giant plastic pair of sunglasses on their face either, and the yellow camera ring wasn't exactly subtle.

Some interesting ideas in there for sure, and I'd genuinely be interested to see what future revisions may/might have looked like, but as it is today it has a long ways to go before I'd call it both "well designed and functional". I'm not surprised in the least this fizzled out once the pretty nicely done viral marketing campaign with the vending machines ended.

The 'circular' recording/playback format for the video that meant every recording worked in either landscape or portrait was really nice though. It was especially neat how one could alter the viewing format while the video played by rotating the phone, almost as if exposing a rectangular portion of the underlying circle. The charging case was also a nice touch.

[gaius]

Snapchat people are mainly interested in selfies. It was always going to be a stretch to sell them a product that was about other people. That suggests a bigger issue: that Snapchat's management doesn't understand its user base, and will therefore struggle to develop new products for them.

[umeshunni]

Good point. Also, failure of the product in the US doesn't necessarily preclude it from being successful in China or other Asian markets where the cultural norms around wearables might be different.