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by MatthewPhillips
4831 days ago
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I'll go ahead and predict that smart watches flop. Hard. I think people want some new thing after tablets are becoming normal, and we thought that was going to be TV, but the content industry has built really good moats around TV so no one can shake it up. So in the urgency to create a new market, smart watches are easy, are direct-to-consumer, have been done in the past and only need polish. That doesn't mean anyone will want one once the "shiny new thing" feeling wears off. |
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That's the truly hilarious part. If someone delivers a smartwatch that might work, it'll be derided as being "lesser" than the preceding products. [1]
If they deliver something that throws the kitchen sink at the watch form-factor, it will be derided because people have been doing that (unsuccessfully) for years now.
If you ask me, the killer approach for a 'smartwatch' is fuelband/fitbit-style passive data collection [2] paired with proximity based two-factor authentication for smartphones and computers. [3] You can throw in notifications with swipe-to-dismiss. [4] But much more than that is just never going to work well enough to be worthwhile. [5]
The very idea of prolonged interaction with a watch is silly. It's going to be too fiddly to be faster than just pulling your phone out. So why would anyone even bother?
But the tech press would trash such a device.
[1] polish will almost certainly include stripping away functionality that's currently present on watch-phones, just as tablets had to shed desktop OSes.
[2] just go hog-wild with sensors. the biggest value-add will be in providing more/better data to apps and services accessed on other devices.
[3] e.g. you step up to your PC in the morning, it asks your password. For the rest of the day, when you walk away it auto-locks and when you come back, it unlocks. Similarly your phone only asks for an unlock code once every 4 or 8 hours and in between treats the presence of the watch as a sufficient token.
[4] Also: "swipe to open this on my phone". So one doesn't see a notification on their watch, see something that deserves attention and then have to re-navigate to that notification or app to act upon it.
[5] And, no, no-one wants to talk on a watch-phone like Dick Tracy. And bluetooth headsets & earPod-style headphone/mic combos already have buttons you can press to answer calls without grabbing your phone.