Time stands still for some in the smartwatch market.
With Apple set to release “Series 2” of its Watch and Samsung prepping its Gear S3 timepiece, many of the biggest players that have embraced Google’s Android Wear software have decided to hit pause on their own efforts.
It seems like only Apple and Samsung are willing – and capable – of propping up what is at best a lukewarm product segment.
Android is popular on phones and that’s cause everyone needs a phone.
Out side of that Googles other products like Chrome cast and Chrome books etc don’t run Android.
Things like Android TV and Android Wear are complete flops.
Google should keep Android to Phones and a some tablets and that’s about it. (Might be best to sell those them selves at this point)
And update the Play Store contracts to require OS updates or when not respected, the access to Play Store would be invalidated.
“Android is popular on phones and that’s cause everyone needs a phone. ”
Exactly. Very few people actually “need” a smartwatch right now (i.e., in their current form, state and capabilities). Quite a number of people need fitness trackers, but of those there are many, being orders of magnitude better than what smartwatches offer in this area.
Right.
Garmin should release a fitness focused Android Wear smartwatch. I think that would be more interesting to more people than the cringe-inducing offerings of these tech companies. Any smartwatch that has a watch face that is a mockup of an analog watch face is doing it wrong, in my opinion. And that includes Apple.
Calling the “smartwatch” a lukewarm product segment is being generous. It is a product destined to fail because aside of being mostly useless/novelty, they require more effort to be addicted to. People are already accustomed to a certain degree of laziness with their “smartphone” you can achieve with a watch unless you take it off your wrist and actually want less features and a very limited display.
Agreed. I’ve tried, as an intellectual exercise, to imagine a use case for one of these for myself. I haven’t been able to come up with a single thing. To check the time, I have a watch. For everything else, my phone’s right there. What’s the point of having a watch that’s bad at being a watch (needs charged all the time), and bad at doing what my phone can already do without a dependent external device?
Garmin, TomTom, Pebble, and others have the right idea — start from scratch & build a sane API (at least for Pebble) instead of trying to strip down a bloated smartphone OS. Design your own from the ground up with minimal resource requirements. How do you think their products have much longer battery life than Android Wear or watchOS devices? It’s called innovation, people.
I would say “low end hardware”.
Take for example my Garmin Fenix 3, battery life is excellent, the GPS is excellent but storage sucks, both in terms of space and speed. Screen is made to be really low on reasources, but colors are quite faded and few.
it is all about what you want from your watch.
If it is battery life, then expect to have lower end hardware that draws little power. If you wish to gave a nice display and fast storage, expect the battery life instead to be lower.
Both segments innovate.
I quite like the look of Casio’s WSD-F10 smartwatch that was launched (seemingly only in the US/Japan so far 🙁 ) earlier this year. It has a clever dual display – if you switch to the mono display, the battery life zooms to a month, which is much more sensible in my books than the day or two you currently get on most smartwatches.
I think the reason no-one’s shouting about the Casio is that the price – considering Casio isn’t a premium brand really – is very high: $500 in the US, which will probably translate to close to that in pounds if they ever release it in the UK. If it was half that price and available in more than 2 countries, I suspect it would sell like hot cakes, even if it is a huge “sporty” watch.
It’s hard to believe, but that Casio does not have GPS…
The dual display is a clever idea though. There are two things that I personally find essential in a sports watch: the first is a display that stays on and that is perfectly readable outdoors. The second is hardware buttons.