Ask Slashdot: What Smartwatch Apps Could You See Yourself Using?

An anonymous reader writes: It's official: the smartwatch wars have begun. Apple's announcement of the Apple Watch added a contender to the race already shaping up between the Pebble watch, the Moto 360, and others. Personally, my doubts about wanting one were put to rest when I learned of the health-related features. Smartwatches will be able to track your movements and pulse rate, calculate how many calories you burn, and coach you continuously to improve your fitness.

If you have one or plan on buying one, what apps or functions do you see yourself getting the most use from? If you're still skeptical, what would it take? (If an app developer sees your requirements here on Slashdot, your wish might come true.)

Comments

I'm not sold yet....

[GoJays]

Currently I see no reason to have a smartwatch, it just seems like an expensive watch that relays notifications from my phone. I have no problem reaching into my pocket to grab my phone when needed. Everything these smartwatches can do, my phone can already do and usually better. This to me just seems like having a pager and a cell phone years ago, is it really necessary? I do see the potential for these devices, I just don't think they are there yet.

It's not just apps, but speed and UX.

[aussersterne]

This is I think the thing that so many people miss about the Apple Watch announcement. The problem with existing smart watches hasn't been that the features aren't useful, it's that the promised features simply don't work. I owned two different smart watches and had the same experience:

- Extremely limited app selection
- Very, very slow and oversimple apps that did exist
- With input that was just plain cumbersome and unreliable
- And bluetooth connectivity that had to be constantly restarted/reconnected (like, every time you tried to use it, bluetooth was down)

As I've said in previous posts, I'm one of those that does still wear a watch every single day, so I could be an obvious target for a smart watch, at least moreso than people that don't wear a watch at all and haven't done so in years, if ever.

But for a smart watch to make sense, it can't be a worse experience than pulling out the phone. Watches will always lose on the screen size front, so it's got to be compelling in other areas. The phone experience does have some problems (you have to pull it out, it's risky to pull out and manipulate in some contexts—walking in the city, for example, where a drop can kill it and jostles from pedestrians can come easily, it's bulky and conspicuous, you have to put it back, and so on), so it's not inconceivable that a smart watch could make sense.

But smart watches thus far have been lessons in user friction—you had to really, really, really want to do a given task *on your smart watch*. One that I tried for a few days (the Sony watch) only recognized about 10% of the taps that you made (Want to tap that button once? Then tap manically on the screen over the button 15 times in rapid succession and hope one of them takes.) and was so slow and oversimple (presumably due to lower processing power) that even aside from UI horribleness, it just plain didn't do anything very well in practical terms.

If the Apple Watch has:

- Processing power analagous to that of smartphones
- A high-resolution display
- Input surfaces and controls that are as reliable as those of smartphones
- Battery life long enough to get through a day with certainty
- Reasonable ruggedness
- Stable bluetooth connectivity without hassles

Then it could well be a winner, not because it claims to do anything new, but because it actually managed to do what smart watches claim to do. So far, my experience with smart watches was that they claim a lot, then do absolutely none of it in practice. It's not that the feature list sucks, it's that the features themselves haven't actually been implemented in such a way that you can use them without sitting down for ten minutes to have a "smart watch session" and eke out a tap or two.