Samsung did what they wanted to do: they got a watch out the door faster than Apple or Google. Unfortunately, it seems a very Samsung sort of watch: all kinds of features, a slightly clumsy UI, and a battery that may not make it through the day – and right now, it only works with the two new Samsung devices just announced. Ultimately I suspect this was launched more for the sake of “FIRSTIES” and not for the sake of an optimal product. Say what you like, but when Apple ships, the thing will be ready…for what it does.
See, that’s the thing: a watch is going to have to start at the bottom and scale up. The tablet market wasn’t cracked until Apple chose to scale up the phone OS rather than cram down the desktop OS. Similarly, someone like Pebble has a much better grip on the smart watch: what do you NEED it to do? Shoot pictures? Probably not. Hell, you probably don’t even need a color display at this point. What you DO need is not to charge it every night. We’re more or less accustomed to that with phones at this point – the days of plugging my SonyEricsson Z520 in twice a week are long past – but to have to do it with a watch, to take it off every night and plug it in? Pebble sorted that by focusing on battery life – still the most important trick in mobility computing – and for their trouble got a watch that could go for a week, can be worn in the shower (assuming it’s not too hot) and can be charged with a MagSafe-type cable.
Then there’s the other thing: the fitness monitor. Many of my friends have latched onto these, and the wife has started using the FitBit One – pedometer, activity tracker, can even tell whether you were going up stairs. Easy to quantify and easier to monitor from a phone app. No reason it couldn’t all be rolled into a watch; after all, the Fitbit Flex or Jawbone Up or Nike FUELBand are all on the wrist. So there’s that – take your time-and-date and pop your Fitbit on there as well, and there’s your smart watch. What else do we need?
Well, notifications. Apparently notifications are a big deal, as evinced by the attention given to the power-sipping active notification mechanism of the Moto X. Presumably any notification you can get on your wrist is one less time you have to pull out the phone, unlock it, open an app or pull down a windowshade panel, all while burning through battery with that big bright screen. So notification triage, and maybe even the ability to read text messages in full, possibly with some canned replies. Throw that in there.
Now…each of the Big Two mobile operating systems has its specific party piece. For Apple, it’s Siri; for Android, it’s Google Now. Each represents a potentially useful way of interacting with the phone via watch. With Siri, you do it all via voice. Talk to the watch, hear the phone speak back via the watch or show you what would be on the phone screen on the watch (which probably mandates a color display or else some rejiggering of the UI). With Google Now, it’s the constant push of cards to the watch (ditto re: the UI) and the ability to flip through traffic conditions on the way home or weather or flight tracking or what have you. Each is potentially useful but would require some extra work from the OS side to make it function easily.
That’s the trick: it’s going to be difficult to come up with more than a bare-bones device that isn’t inherently tied to iOS. Or to Samsung. Or to Motorola, or HTC, or just Android. Pebble is way ahead of the curve on a genericised interface, but to really get use out of it may entail a bigger commitment to one manufacturer or another. Which brings us to the Google Now problem generally.
See, I’ve done everything I can to try to make Google Now useful for me, but it doesn’t do much. Weather report (of varying quality), commute directions (kinda sorta), transit info (when close to a stop), and to be honest not very much more. Why? Because I don’t use Gmail for anything. If it doesn’t have your email to mine, Google Now can’t offer you very much in the way of scheduling or prediction or “hey, leave now if you want to make your flight.” And even the notional alternatives (thinking of the slightly-stale Osito here) need to have Gmail access to do much more.
The problem, then, is that if you want the benefits of something like Google Now, you have to commit to Google for your services. Which is asking a lot (which I’m sure is what Google wants). The “Today” view in iOS 7 will give you a little of this, supposedly, and apps like Donna are already trying to replicate some of the functionality with your calendar by rolling travel and weather and even car service via Uber into the package. But it’s not all the way there.
Ultimately, the thing is this: at some point the Google Now-like service has to be something that does all its data mining and processing locally on the phone itself. Independent or at least agnostic of service provider, able to get useful info out of your work email without compromising your security in doing so and able to leverage whatever personal email provider you use without relying on Google’s technology. In a way, that’s already present in iOS – for instance, if you get email with a tracking number from UPS or FedEx and tap on that tracking number, you’ll see “Track Shipment” as an option, irrespective of whence came the email. Apple Data Detectors – a technology that Apple first rolled out in 1997 then largely ignored until two or three years ago – can do that right now, already parsing out addresses to be sent to the address book (or soon to Maps) or dates to be sent to the calendar. So the technology is there and it doesn’t take much to suggest that it could be extended to include things like flight confirmation numbers or the like.
All of this is a very roundabout way of saying that I fully expect an Apple watch before long, and I expect it to rely on the functionality of iOS 7 to deliver a thin but satisfying slice of data to a glorified wrist-bound FitBit. And in doing so, obviate the need for the phone itself to do a lot of the heavy lifting that currently makes it difficult if not impossible to use the iPhone itself as your fitness/presence tracker (see: the battery-slaughter of Saga or Human or Moves). Anything that can be staffed out to something with its own separate battery is good for your phone.
So now we wait. Every man his own Big Data. It’s coming.