Sell Me The Smartwatch Idea.

I like gadgets, to the point where it I can get a little weird about things if they have just the right technological bent. My geek lust has seen my wallet open itself for all sorts of purchases I wouldn’t have typically made for myself just because the gadget geek in me fell in love with a piece of engineering or ingenious technology. It’s curbed somewhat by my desire for all things to have an useful function but that still means my house is littered with various objects which have caught my fancy at one point or another. With that in mind you’d think that I’d be something of a prime candidate for a smartwatch but I just can’t see the point of having one.

I’ll admit that I was somewhat impressed by the Pebble when I first saw it, mostly due to the fact that it used an e-Ink screen rather than a small LCD (which are notorious for being crap). I came in late to the Kickstarter however and missed out on my chance to get one but I figured it wouldn’t be too long before I could snag one at retail. Of course long delays ensued and many competitors have since released similar products but strangely enough I found myself looking at all of them and then wondering what the use case for them would be. Sure some of them looked cool (I’m something of a sucker for watches) but I couldn’t see the advantage of getting one over a traditional watch, especially if looks were the deciding factor.

The majority of the functionality seems to be focused towards at-a-glance style information coming from your smartphone like alerting you to messages or other application alerts. Whilst I can see some use for this most of the time those messages would require some action on my behalf something which these watches aren’t designed to accommodate. Using it as an external mic/speaker for my phone is something I don’t see myself using either as the quality is always going to be below that of what my phone itself can provide. Couple all this with the fact that it’s yet another device I’ll have to charge and I can’t really see the point of getting one, at least not in their current incarnations.

I could be convinced on the idea if the smartwatches included some functionality like the FitBit One and Jabone UP in them, possibly alongside an implementation of MYO. Whilst I’d love to do more metric tracking so that I could better hone my fitness program the idea of having another wearable, chargeable device always poses a significant barrier. However if a combination of all this tech could find its way into a single device then I could see myself warming to the idea as then it would be providing a whole host of functionality that my phone does not. At the same time I probably wouldn’t even need the traditional smartwatch capabilities if a fitness tracker, MYO and watch were all combined into one but if you’d already integrated that much tech it’d be inevitable to just go that one further step.

Of course I know hear the caterwauling of people thinking “Scratch your own itch! Build it yourself!” but honestly I’m not that wedded to the idea at all, just more musing over what it would take for me to come over to the smartwatch camp. I’m happy for someone to try and sell me on the idea though as I’m never adverse to spending money for good tech, so long as it serves a purpose.