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People Still Aren't Buying Smartwatches -- and It's Only Going To Get Worse (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Wearable technology still isn't catching up. Despite a year full of exciting new smartwatches, tech-enabled clothing or jewelry, and fitness activity trackers galore, the growth of the wearables market is still on the decline, according to a new report from research firm eMarketer. In fact, the entire category is being overtaken by smart speakers, at least during the 2017 holiday season. "Other than early adopters, consumers have yet to find a reason to justify the cost of a smartwatch, which can sometimes cost as much as a smartphone," eMarketer forecasting analyst Cindy Liu wrote in the report. "Instead, for this holiday season, we expect smart speakers to be the gift of choice for many tech enthusiasts, because of their lower price points."
Maybe it's because I don't want an accessory on my wrist that offers almost no advantages over the cell in my pocket, meanwhile costing the same as a nice watch but looking like an 80's calculator wrist watch.
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The Pebble hit it right - it did just enough, and the battery lasted a long time on a charge.
None of the crap the fancier watches do is worth having to charge them so frequently.
Based on supplier-estimates, so perhaps not the most precise way to measure potential sales:
https://www.phonearena.com/news/Going-strong-the-Apple-Watch-is-en-route-to-set-another-sales-record-in-2018_id100638
I've got enough distractions without another one on my wrist. One that I have to charge up every day. One that doesn't do much without the phone that it is paired with. I like watches - real watches with automatic movements. Little mechanical works of art. Not some stupid little redundant blue tooth toy.
To me, wearing a watch at all was always uncomfortable and troublesome, and barely worth the effort just for being able to have a timepiece handy. Upon getting a mobile phone which told the time, I happily gave up wearing a watch. In smartwatches, I see much the same thing as the old-fashioned kind: it's an inconvenient thing strapped to the wrist that doesn't do anything that the phone more conveniently out of the way but still easily accessible in my pocket does.
There are arguments to be made regarding ease/convenience of contactless payment - ie not even needing to get the phone out of one's pocket, but I find that offset by needing to twist the back of the wrist around to meet the EFTPOS terminal. Something that would allow just waving the palm of the hand at the terminal would be better in that regard, but more troublesome in others - needing to wear some kind of glove with a chip located where it would be uncomfortable when doing just about anything else with one's hands. The potential answer to that might be implanting the chip, but that presents its own issues.
And smartwatches are the most promising - or maybe least unpromising - of the bunch. Smart glasses with augmented reality functionality have a decent amount of potential, but there is a lot wrong with them from a general privacy point of view, and even the early adopting nerds and geeks aren't about to be told that we should abandon the idea of privacy, never mind society at large. Fitness tracking devices are a nice idea in theory, but so far have tended not to actually make things better. And no other form of wearable technology really has any advantage over a smartphone in your pocket.
Why is the word WORSE in the headline? There is nothing worse about consumers refusing to be fooled into buying crap they do not need.
You and your KA band. HF is enough for for anyone.
Cabbage patch kids? Hulu hoops? Lava lamps? Tamagotchis? Smart watches? Anyone?
In other words, fads come and go.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It's only growing, not growing fast enough... welcome to the new fail. Also iWatch sales are actually up 50% YoY. The convenience of not fishing the phone out of your pocket was always going to be slim. Not everyone wants any watch on their wrist, much less tech bling. Oh and the iWatch 3 comes in a cellular version you can use without the phone, at the cost of battery life. The whole article reads like "they'll never be able to put a useful computer in a watch form factor". Well that's what they said about PCs. And laptops. And phones. I'm not sure saying it about watches is a good bet...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Networked underwear? Like a toaster that emails me when my toast is done? That's silly. Why would I want my underwear emailing me when the toast is done?
Two fundamental problems with smart watches:
My smart phone that is always in my pocket does far more and is less likely to get damaged.
My dumb digital watch with an electrolumenescent back-light still does what I expect a watch to do, it does it for $35 dollars, it's permanently water proof for showers and pool swimming, it lasts 6 years on a single battery and I can't figure out why I would want to replace it.
The screen of a smart watch is too small to do jack on and other than maybe buying a fitness tracker, I can't fathom screwing around with watch apps when my nice big phone is right in my pocket. The smart watch is a hangover from the Dick Tracey days of the radio watch fantasy, the problem is we already have better tech than was imagined in the Star Trek communicators, so we kind of leap frogged the whole Dick Tracey watch thing both functionally and practically. Now smart watches are relegated to to the nerd toy aisle unless and until they can be more practical than a real watch with some actually valuable, unique functions.
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