Why Smartwatches Failed

I still really like my Pebble Time Steel. It's a shame they basically got killed off my Fitbit, especially since I ditched my Fitbit to go with the Pebble. The one week charge is what I really love about it-that and it feels more like a watch with smart features, rather than a phone on my wrist that happens to also be a watch. I refuse to own yet another device that I have to charge every damn day.
 
I have several smart watches, a Moto 360, Asus Zenwatch 2, and a Samsung Gear Fit 2 that are great indoors, but useless outdoors, where the screens are completely washed out. As I work outside and drive a lot, only my Pebble gets worn to work. All week battery life, and I can see notifications and caller ID without pulling my phone out of my pocket.
 
What I want on my smart watch, 100% of which could be done with simple symbols and doesn't even have to be a full LCD screen:
Time
Notifications
Weather?

What manufacturers thought we wanted on a smart watch (In Order of "importance"):
Facetime
Calling
Voice Recording
GPS
Snapchat
Camera
Contacts
Some crazy james bond bullshit
An umbrella
notifications
...
...
Time.


Classic over thinking. Could have made a fortune pumping out $100-$150 BASIC smart watches.
Watches are fashion accessories. The only things I want is for it too look good.

None of them do, either to fat or... square. A dude wearing a square watch? Frick off apple.
 
I bought the 360 when it first came out, and then the Apple Watch. I use the Apple watch everyday, it does pretty much everything I want a smart watch to do. Its also cheap enough to where if I break it I wont feel so guilty like some of my other watches.
 
It could also be something of app overload.

There is a fear in the military specifically the air force, that ideas may overload a pilots ability to ingest all of the screens of information that they can put in a plane's cockpit.

The first smart watches should have been a display mirroring what a phone was doing with some touch/button functionality. Easy to understand because of a limited display on a wrist. Giving so many options across so many different lines may have overloaded the display so nobody wanted to have one. A mirroring functionality that the user could program - you like facebook, I like e-mail notifications - may have sold better.

Useful!

Maybe a round two will be coming. Eventually there will be a smart phone. Designers will just have to be smarter first.
 
I have a moto 360 watch (which was given to me) If I knew how useful this thing is, I would have totally bought one sooner. It really does keep me up to date when I don't notice my phone go off.
 
I use smart watch all the time and disagree with article. It is a great tool.
 
Who the hell wears watches any more? You can be damn near anywhere and within one 360 degree rotation of your head,you can find the time.

Or a Chiropractors office :)
 
I have a three year old Garmin Vivo Fit that I love. Tells the time, does all the fitness sleep tracking stuff, and never needs to be charged. Just one battery change every 18 months. It's hardly a smart watch though.

My wife still regrets giving hers away when she got a gear2. For those that think all smart watches need a phone to work hers has its own 4g and stays synced to her phone even when she's miles away. It technically has its own phone number.
 
I consider myself an avid consumer of new novel tech. As such, you'd think a smartwatch would be just the thing to capture my eye and imagination, yet it did anything but. I was 'meh' about it from the get-go. I knew it could be nothing more than a cut-down smartphone slapped around your wrist.
 
The best was the Microsoft Band 2, at least from my experience. However, it was also the worst physical quality so, instead of MS fixing the issues, they just killed it off instead. :( Nothing else even comes close.
 
My issue is that I have opposable thumbs and it's simply less tiring to use both than having to keep my left arm extended.
 
My Tag Heuer watch assortment disagrees with you highly. Get a good solid watch from a solid manufacturer and you will learn to love wearing them again.

All my watches sit in a box, I feel sad that I don't wear them but I just don't care to anymore. I pretty much only put mine on a rare occasion I wear as suit or formal attire. I several nice self winding watches and a vintage gold Rado but as I got older I lost interest showing them off as I never look at a watch for time anyway. Now you have time everywhere so a watch now is really more of a jewelry accessory than anything useful. Sad but true, I'm glad you still wear your Tag. I'm not sure I'll really ever get into wearing a watch again on a daily basis.
 
Because I want to be offline some times and not being disturbed by my watch.
 
Lots of weird complaints in this thread that don't seem to apply to any decent smartwatch. Durability is maybe the only real complaint.
 
My Pebbles (Pebble Steel and Pebble Time) have been through hell and back in terms of how I treat them. The week long charge has been unmatched by anything else I've seen - even with the (admittedly not super great) color screen on the Steel.

Too bad they went belly up, I was hoping to see future models with more features.
 
I love my Fitbit Blaze. I think the problem was that too many companies priced them too high, made them too bulky, and tried to make them a replacement for a phone, which they're not. The screen is useless for anything complex, but works great for a heartrate and fitness tool.
 
I use the hell out of mine. If you are expecting it to be a replacement for a smartphone then you've missed the point. My phone rains notifications during the day and my apple watch combined with the AirPods means I can go almost all day without having to take the phone out of my pocket. This is a huge perk for a busy professional worker sitting in meetings and such all day. Perhaps if you dig ditches and use your phone for games and youtube/porn then your perspective may be different.
 
Someone tried that, and it failed.

That being said, I love my first-gen Pebble.

Yeah, I think even Pebble was just too much. I just imagine a simple digital watch using standard LCD watch technology, upper half used for time/date, bottom sections just a circle for the last incoming notification type (email, twitter, fb) and another circle for a weather icon. Vibrate on notify. I've seen BLE devices running on cr2032 batteries, so I don't know why this isn't feasible other than it isn't techy enough to attract buyers? no backlight needed, could do the whole indiglow thing.

It just seems like all the smart watch makers went from 0 to 100 without taking any of the steps between.
 
..getting back to the article...."Enterprises should have embraced them first". Does your job force you to wear a suit or tie? Ok. But now you gotta wear a watch? With sensors on it? Fuck That Shit.
 
Yeah, I think even Pebble was just too much. I just imagine a simple digital watch using standard LCD watch technology, upper half used for time/date, bottom sections just a circle for the last incoming notification type (email, twitter, fb) and another circle for a weather icon. Vibrate on notify. I've seen BLE devices running on cr2032 batteries, so I don't know why this isn't feasible other than it isn't techy enough to attract buyers? no backlight needed, could do the whole indiglow thing.

Then maybe the Pebble was just ahead of its time...all those things can be configured (either on the watch or in the app) and you just described my daily use parameters - no backlight, time/date/weather on main screen, recent notifications three button presses away (but that could be changed with a different watch face).
 
I have a LG G Watch Urbane 2. It looks like a normal watch and is normally mistaken for one until a notification pops up. Almost every time I go out I get compliments or comments on the watch. Since it has an LTE connection I can leave my phone charging in my office and get texts, emails, phone calls, basically anything I need. The battery lasts about a day and half, I just throw it on the charger when I take a shower and it's always fully charged. When using navigation it displays turn direction and street name on the bottom quarter of the display and vibrates when I'm approaching a turn, this allows me to use google navigation or waze without having some obnoxious voice interrupting my music or conversation. It's simple to block notifications from applications I don't want to see. I hadn't worn a watch in over a decade before I purchased the Urbane 1 and I feel naked if I leave the house without it now.
 
Battery life, battery life, battery life. Those three things kept me from doing an Apple watch. Once you get fully featured smart watches that can go a couple days between charges, you will see their usage go up.
 
Never saw the appeal TBH. And I've been wearing wristwatches my whole life. I was the population/market segment that needed to be convinced to buy and they never did.
 
I don't know if going after the enterprise market first would have helped, at least not where I work. Smart watches, like phones, are considered a security risk and have to be checked in and locked up whenever someone needs to enter the server rooms. There are also numerous other areas where they are not permitted.

Despite the annoyance of that, as I look around my office, quite a few of us own smart watches or intelligent fitness trackers.

For me, the wife and I have a Apple Watches (Series 1), and have worn them for about 1.5 years now. We owned Withings Pulse O2 fitness trackers for a year or so before. As for the last time I wore a watch before owning a smart watch, I think I stopped wearing watches around the time I started to use my cell phone to text regularly (so around 2007).

Initially, I was concerned about battery life. But I figured if it can last me a full day without issue, I don't mind putting it on the charger like I do my phone. The inductive charging is a nice touch. Through actual use, my Apple Watch lasts a full day without issue and I could go two days providing I don't mind putting it in low power mode at some point during day 2. As I type this, my watch has 85% battery life and it has been off the charger for 9 hours. By the time I go to bed, I am usually sitting at around 65% (+/- 5%). My wife's watch seems to go through more battery life than mine, but her watch face has a lot more going on than mine plus she uses the fitness tracking more too. But even then, she is still able to make it a full day without hitting low power mode. She does, though, have a habit of not docking the watch correctly, only to wake up in the morning to find it hasn't charged.

As for the classification of watches, I see them more as a peripheral than a device. At the moment, there is very little the smart watch can do that you cannot do on your phone (which you have to have on hand to get the most out of watch anyways). And so long as you expect it to be as much and use it as such, it works out quite well. The smart watch, for the most part, adds convenience and subtlety more than anything else. My hands are free more often, keeping that phone in my pocket instead. I can read and respond to texts quickly without having to reach for my phone or review my notifications, all without being a distraction by appearing distracted (e.g., meetings, at the movies, dinner, etc.).

It also works great for multitasking. I'm Target Cartwheel user but I use a different app for my shopping list. With my Apple Watch, I pull up my shopping list on it and use Cartwheel on my phone. It saves me time from having to switch apps and I am able to quickly pull up my list while having free hands to hold and pickup items.

The bottom line is you have to use it to get the most out of it and to learn what it is capable of doing. While that pretty much applies to anything and everything, it seems to be very much the requirement for smart watches while with smart phones not so much. My stepmom bought an Apple Watch almost a year before I did. She admits that she hasn't taken the time to really learn what it could do and apply that to her daily life, yet she complains that it doesn't do as much as she was hoping it would. It can do what she wants it to do, she just hasn't put the initial effort in to realize that. Once you realize what it can do, using it becomes about as effortless as the phone. I think this is really where the faults lie with the smart watch. You have those that see its potential and take advantage of it, then you have others that give up too early. It's like the "New Year's Resolutions" of smart devices.
 
The whole point of a wristwatch is being able to tell the time at a glance. That's why they eclipsed pocketwatches. I don't want to dig for a phone to know the time. And I don't want to press buttons to see it either. If it's a watch, it should show the time. If it's a smartwatch, it shouldn't NEED to be teathered to a phone an arms length away. We don't really have smart watches yet. We basically have have smart phones with a remote on our wrist that has a couple of basic functions. When we have a watch that makes it's own calls, video calls, has TV, radio and stores our own music, then THAT will be a smart watch. What we have now, well, no. Doesn't fit the bill. I'd be willing to wear something the size of the ipod nano 6th gen., of which I have one in a watchband. Battery life? Maybe a day. But again, the screen goes dark after about a few seconds. If it woke up when I said the word 'Time', or even answered me in audio mode, I'd buy something like that. Right now, I can keep my phone in my pocket, and ask the phone. Back to further miniturization of what we already have.
My Tag Heuer watch assortment disagrees with you highly. Get a good solid watch from a solid manufacturer and you will learn to love wearing them again.
A nice watch is pretty much the only jewelry a man can wear, other than a wedding ring, without looking like Guido.
I have a first gen Moto 360 that I wear every day. I like seeing notifications without looking at my phone.
That's the last thing I want; constant notifications of bullshit. If someone wants me, they can call. I get enough nonsense texts and emails now.
To be fair, I do see quite a few folks wearing nice-looking "regular" watches, but that's more as a status symbol than anything else. Brands such as Rolex, Omega, Breitling, Cartier, Rado, Longines, even TAG Heuer (amongst a whole bunch of Swiss brands) seem to command a certain amount of social respect. Kinda like having the "wearable" equivalent of driving a Porsche, BMW, Audi, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, and so on.
If you're going to wear a watch, may as well be one that looks nice; but it doesn't have to be expensive anymore. Even generic Asian automatic mechanisms are amazingly accurate. But me, I prefer traditional size watches, not these big clown size 44mm width, 17 mm thick monstrosities that I can't even button my shirtsleeves if I'm wearing one. My 1972 Bulova (the first watch I purchased myself) is a 38mm wide case.
 
The watch will return when there is decent mobile voice through it. Next Gen Alexa grade voice interaction.
 
The whole point of a wristwatch is being able to tell the time at a glance. That's why they eclipsed pocketwatches. I don't want to dig for a phone to know the time. And I don't want to press buttons to see it either. If it's a watch, it should show the time. If it's a smartwatch, it shouldn't NEED to be teathered to a phone an arms length away. We don't really have smart watches yet. We basically have have smart phones with a remote on our wrist that has a couple of basic functions. When we have a watch that makes it's own calls, video calls, has TV, radio and stores our own music, then THAT will be a smart watch. What we have now, well, no. Doesn't fit the bill. I'd be willing to wear something the size of the ipod nano 6th gen., of which I have one in a watchband. Battery life? Maybe a day. But again, the screen goes dark after about a few seconds. If it woke up when I said the word 'Time', or even answered me in audio mode, I'd buy something like that. Right now, I can keep my phone in my pocket, and ask the phone. Back to further miniturization of what we already have.

A nice watch is pretty much the only jewelry a man can wear, other than a wedding ring, without looking like Guido.

The point of a smart watch is no more about keeping time than a smart phone is about making phone calls. I'd rather grab my phone on those rare occasions that I need to know the time (and there's not a computer or clock in front of me). Probably the only exception is if I'm at a music festival where I may want to know the time and I might be out of phone juice. But the reality is I haven't worn my wrist watch in at least 5 or 6 months. I probably wear one less than 30 days/year.

FWIW, I've seen plenty of guys with rings, earrings, watches and occasionally a small gold necklace (that's probably more expensive that it looks). Most look fine, IMO, though I mostly avoid that stuff.
 
My solar atomic Casio G-shock has all the tech I need in a watch... and never needs a charge.
 
Smartwatch: because browsing the web on your wrist is so "in".
 
Fuck Fitbit. They bought out Pebble which was making great products and they immediately shelved everything Pebble was doing.

ok ok, I did get a great deal on a Pebble Time Steel as a result, but still.
 
Great article.

I am a watch guy and I wear a gshock and some Swiss autos. Cannot ever see myself wearing a smartwatch. They're for a different crowd.
 
HMZ hit it on the head. Smart Watches are for the tech / geek crowd, not for normal folks. For it to become ubiquitous it has to either get a killer app or the battery tech has to catch up.

No one likes having to charge yet another gadget daily.

This was the primary reason I went with Pebble ... sure it's functionality is much more limited by comparison to Android Watch / Apple Watch ... but it does what I need and (for me) it lasts a week per charge.
 
I bought an LG G Watch R when it came out a couple years ago, changed the strap to a nice custom leather strap and been wearing it every day... I work in very loud enviornments with lots of vibration and I would never, ever, hear my phone... but the vibration on my wrist does get my attention... so it's been quite great at work...

That's the last thing I want; constant notifications of bullshit. If someone wants me, they can call. I get enough nonsense texts and emails now.

calm down there grandpa... anyway that's why I love my smartwatch... I don't have to get my phone to see who is calling, I can ignore all my calls right from my wrist!
 
I don't have to get my phone to see who is calling, I can ignore all my calls right from my wrist!
Wow. You must be deluged with unwanted calls. I mean, if you ignore all your calls? What's the point of even having the phone turned on?
 
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