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Wearables Still Slow To Catch On in the United States (axios.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The use of wearable technology devices -- like watches, glasses and fitness tracking bracelets -- will grow 11.9 percent next year, eMarketer predicts, with the growth rate continuing to slow compared to previous years. Smartwatches will drive the bulk of wearables growth, but the number of people who use wearable technology will still be less than 20 percent of the population. Experts suggest wearable adoption will slow due to cost and unmet user expectations. Still, others, like analyst firm IDC, predict that U.S. wearable use will continue to climb, doubling in size by devices shipped 2021, just at a slower pace.
The main question is why: why in the world would you want to wear your computer?
Most consumer-oriented 'innovation' these days revolves around generating a solution prior to identifying a problem. The software-startup market is plagued by this, but for some reason, our collective bullshit meter is turned off when evaluating the usefulness of software. Every time you turn around, there's another "Tinder for [x]" or "Uber for [y]" being touted as the latest and greatest.
We seem to respond differently to something tangible, though. Adoption is slow because most of us recognize that the current offerings of 'wearables' don't pose a significant enough improvement in our lives to justify purchasing them.
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Smartwatches will drive the bulk of wearables growth, but the number of people who use wearable technology will still be less than 20 percent of the population. Experts suggest wearable adoption will slow due to cost and unmet user expectations.
It's not about the cost. It's about the fact that they don't solve any problems for most of the people that might consider buying them. Until someone cracks the code on devices that actually do something that smartphones cannot they aren't going to see widespread adoption. There also is the fact that most of them cannot be used as fashion accessories outside of certain very geeky circles.
Look, I should be the ideal demographic for a wearable. I exercise, I love gadgets, I have the disposable income to buy such gadgets. But there literally are none out there that solve any real world problems for me. The Apple Watch, Fitbit, and equivalents don't do anything I actually need 99.999% of the time. (plus I don't like wearing a watch) If I don't wear it during exercise (and I typically don't) there literally is zero utility in them for me that my smartphone doesn't already provide. Wearables are basically small sensor suites, sometimes combined with what is basically a fancy pager. Not useless but definitely niche.
Who would want continual, total, unchecked Surveillance of everything a person does? Not to mention runaway marketing!
Are they actually catching on any faster anywhere else in the world? Does Europe or China actually care about wearables?
The main question is why: why in the world would you want to wear your computer?
Wrong question. People basically do that already. Smartphones rarely leave people's side so for all practical purposes they are wearing it. The question is what does the wearable do for your that the smartphone you already carry does not? There are a few niche uses but none that apply to most of the population. For most people the smartphone accomplishes all the same stuff and quite a lot more. There just hasn't been a killer app for wearables yet.
I find it handy for rather simple things. Getting notifications and texts on my wrist means I don’t miss them any more. I find the timer app handy. Also, having an alarm clock on my wrist is preferable to the one on my nightstand - something I initially learned from my previous wearable, a Garmin Vivosmart.
That said, it’s still an open question whether this Watch will be followed by another one. The battery life isn’t great... and with watchOS 4 it got noticeably worse (heck, lots of stuff went south in watchOS 4 - as what’s been the case with other recent Apple software. Did all the good Apple coders leave six months ago?). And if it ends up having a useful life span of less than three years, I won’t bother with replacing it.
Not to mention there still seems to be boatloads of churn in the space.
#DeleteChrome
I'm speaking about my personal tastes here. I don't claim to be representative of the general public.
I've been using a Pebble for years now, and find it very nearly indispensable. Since Pebble but the dust, though, I've been keeping an eye out for what to replace it with when it dies.
I can't find anything that meets my needs. The existing mart watches all suffer from the same flaw -- they're trying to be, essentially, "smartphones on a watch". In order to do that, they have to make serious sacrifices: they cost an arm and a leg, they have abysmal battery life, and they're much too large.
So currently, it looks like when my watch dies, I'll not be replacing it at all. The wearables market is simple not producing anything that actually meets my needs.
I think it comes down to market research not being done because companies would rather use market-ing to sell what they want to make.
.1 miles or some amount of time)
I would like a smartwatch, but here's what I want from one without a smartphone being handy:
- Watch
- Heart-Rate Monitor w/heart-rate alarms (let me know when I'm out of my 130-170bpm range)
- GPS and route navigation synced from phone in advance (good for riding a bike in a new area)
- Activity Monitor with Interval Alerts (sometimes I want to run intervals, let me know when I've run
- MP3 Player (w/ 4GB+ storage)
- Bluetooth
- WiFi
When a phone is near, I want any automatic synchronization to happen periodic and infrequent (I don't need a battery burning out because it keeps telling my phone "He's still sitting"). I also want to be able force a sync.
I also want it to be no bigger than a classic watch (not these monster-sized watch faces that are popular today) and want 12 hours battery life with GPS and at least 24 hours w/o GPS running.
Depressingly, the Pebble Time2 and Pebble Core would have combined to bring all of this to fruition, but Pebble is no more. =\
I even stopped wearing my dive watch (Citizen Promaster Aqualand (with a metal band replacing the horrible rubber one ) because it needed expensive battery replacements which cost $50 for battery change and predssure test every year.
What exactly is the purpose of a dive watch if you are not actively diving? I wouldn't wear one either but I'm puzzled why anyone would start to wear one.
If you could build even a low powered computing device that had that feature, it'd be a winner - because it would be handy having even a subset of the features a smartphone has, always available at your wrist.
I doesn't matter how little power it draws if it doesn't solve any actual problems the wearer has. Right now all wearables are basically compact sensor suites combined with a fancy pager. If you don't have a need for one or both of those things then a wearable is going to be useless to you especially in circumstances where it is practical to carry a smartphone.
There is no reason to buy them. What can they do that my phone cannot.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
I want to like them, but I just haven't found some amazing need or reason to purchase any. I always have my phone, because it does things better than any small wearable does. My inlaws all have fitbits, and my wife has an Apple Watch, but really I don't have a reason/need/drive to use those things or my phone has a better option. Maybe seeing alerts and texts on my wrist would be convenient, but that's the only thing I see as useful. And that is sort of accompanied by a shrug.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
I think cost is definitely a big part of it.
I don't think so for most people. You could literally give me an Apple watch and I still wouldn't wear it. It's not that I think it is a bad device. I just have absolutely no use for it and I'm not alone in that. I own a fitbit (a gift) and it never gets used. I think for most people it's not about the cost/benefit ratio. It's that the benefit = zero.
Wearing during exercise is one of the primary benefits. The optical heart rate monitors are now as good as the chest straps.
Only if you feel the need to track data about your exercising. Frankly unless you are an elite athlete then you really are just tracking that for grins and giggles most likely or are a hardcore fitness enthusiast. It doesn't matter how good a job they do of it if you don't need to track your heart rate.
One only has to look at the waistline of most americans to know that most of them aren't terribly concerned about their heartrates.
I haven't worn a watch in years because I have my smartphone.
My compelling reason to wear a computer (other than the smartphone unobtrusively in my pocket) is ... ?
I don't think that anybody wants to wear a computer.
Demonstrably untrue. People carry their smartphones everywhere which is basically wearing them. And a wearable IS a computer so I don't really think your point is self consistent.
It lets you see the time without taking out your phone (and getting distracted).
How is this helpful most of the time? I presently have 3 clocks within eyeshot even without getting my phone out of my pocket. You have to be a little OCD about the time to want to wear a watch most of the time these days. I have clocks on the walls, on my PC desktop, in my car, on my phone, and even on street signs in town. A watch to just tell time is hugely redundant.
Remember when we all used to have chest straps with a wrist watch that showed the heart rate? Back then those were $50-$70 which is what a smart watch now costs that serves as the HR monitor plus other stuff.
The only people using heart rate monitors are elite athletes and hard core fitness enthusiasts.
And a watch also serves as jewelry.
It CAN serve as jewlery but let's be honest, the current generations of smart wearables certainly don't fit that description to anyone outside of some very geeky circles. And people don't wear jewelry as a general proposition while exercising.
So unless health, exercise, and jewelry are all three against your religion, a $50 wearable seems like a pretty reasonable thing to have.
One merely has to look at the waistline of most americans to know that health and exercise are not high on their to-do list. And there are plenty of options for jewelry that don't involve carrying around a device that smartphones do better most of the time for most people.
chia pet + pet rock + marketing = tamagotchi
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
I'm slow to adopt a personal tracking device
This is basically why adaptation has been slow. It's generally the "look at me!" douches that adapt them early, and nobody but they themselves wants to be associated with this crowd.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Quite frankly, who is the target audience? Hipsters are already buying them anyway, but there's even a limit to what techno junk they buy. Geeks won't touch something like this with a ten foot pole 'til they can eliminate the vendor lock-in and the total surveillance.
And, well, there isn't really that many other early adopters of technogadgets. If you want to sell something like this to the masses, they have to see a clear benefit, and there simply isn't one that their cellphone can't do satisfactory already.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To me, they are pretty much a gimmick. I've worn a watch for almost 40 of my 50+ years. When a "wearable" watch has a battery that can last at least a month, costs less than 100-150 dollars, I MIGHT think of purchasing one. For now, my overly large Casio Illuminator, less than $50, works just fine, and has a battery that lasts for YEARS. I carry my phone with me, so everything else it right on my belt.
It's not for the tracking. An instantaneous heart rate readout is a measure of whether you are taking it too easy or about to send yourself to the hospital.
Real time measurement is tracking. And you don't genuinely need a heart rate monitor to gauge exertion unless you have some sort of medical condition. If a doctor tells you to keep a close eye on your heart rate then sure - do it. Most people demonstrably don't need that. They just need to get out and exercise and if their heart rate is high for a while they'll get tired and slow down. The human body is pretty good at self regulating that way.
California just told us not to keep our phones in our pockets., which is a bit like "wearing" a device. Of course I keep mine in my pocket all the time. So far, no burns or bone tumors on my hip. I mean, we kind of sort of thought this whole issue of RF was put to bed didn't we? Here it is rearing its ugly head again.
I need a phone to function in modern society though. I don't need whatever it is "wearables" are offering right now.
Maybe some day the "fitness band" will be sophisticated enough to diagnose the cancer that it caused.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The battery life in the Apple Watch Series 3 is around 2.5 days now. With the increase in latent medical monitoring (like the irregular heart rate warnings) wearing a watch will make more and more sense as time passes, alongside the other benefits you noted.
Also the ability to truly just have a watch and ditch the phone is appealing in some situations (though I still think the U.S. carriers charge way too much for Watch plans, $10/month).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I am absolutely horrible with names. Some sort of AR glasses which "stores" name+face data when people say "Hi I'm Jack Ass, Director of Marketing" and "This is my spoiled brat Chrissy riding her pony named 'Glue'" would be good. Then when I see them again, the names comes up, and the relationship info.
Now that I think of it, I think this technology was demonstrated in a Black Mirror episode. Probably not the best endorsement, but I did say it would piss people off...
There isn't a large artery on top of your wrist, where fitness bands use an optical sensor to measure heart rate. The capillaries that they do sense typically lag behind the heartbeat, and have an inconsistent rhythm.
A fingertip sensor works much better, as does a chest strap (which is useless if you're hairy like I am).
But aside from amusement factor, a wrist band will only give you an approximation of your real heart rate, and it may be quite a bit off in either direction.
Until I found out it was only compatible with my S6. The thing was only supported for like a year. Without its paired smartphone it's useless.
It's the same with Apple Watch - it only works with a compatible iPhone.
But while I had it - it kept track of heart rate, sleep patterns - all kinds of fun things.
Google Fit on an Android smartphone is free and probably does enough for 99% of people.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
...most wearables are about fitness tracking.
I don't need a $600 watch to tell me I'm a fatass and not getting enough exercise.
-Styopa
That would be totally awesome! One of the better applications of AR.
Maybe you should examine this closer. Sure, if someone is shoving the device in your face, saying how smart they are for buying it, etc...yeah, those are douchey behaviors.
But merely just wearing it? That just sounds like projection at that point.
If you don't like wearing a watch and don't want to track your exercise, then you aren't really the target market for wearables mate.
Wrong. I'm saying the markets they are targeting are too narrow. I'm willing to wear a watch IF the watch does enough to make it worth the bother. The only time a watch makes sense with the current tech is the rare cases where a smartphone is too bulky or cumbersome which frankly isn't very often. It's just filling in a few corner cases rather than making a whole new market.
I'd love a device that:
1) tells me the time
2) shows what that beep my phone just made was about without having to get it out of my pocket
3) has a battery life that didn't suck
4) tracks my pulse and activity better than my phone can on it's own
5) doesn't look like it's been designed by a four year old
That's frankly not a very creative or useful device. Think bigger. You're imagining a better version of what already exists. I want something far grander. Augmented reality technology or personal security devices or something else that solves problems a smartphone cannot.
Apple Watch can alert you if your heart rate increases without a corresponding increase in detected activity, in what could be a valuable screening tool for atrial fibrillation or other tachydysrhythmias.
You are making my point. That is the very definition of a niche use. Awesome for those who need it but do you really think people are going to start buying watching for the incredibly unlikely chance they experience atrial fibrillation?
Given several more decades we'll have not hardware, not wetware, but probably some kind of mushware that gives us access to whatever the web has turned into by then. The implant subject will certainly be able to turn it off. Ha. Yes, that's probably the only hardware part --a switch on your temple.