Despite all the promises, smartwatches remain an acquired taste. Yes,
there's a market but one that largely caters to the likes of health
junkies and early adopters.
Fitness bands are
cheap and light but too minimalist. Samsung's Galaxy Gear is
all brawn but lacks device compatibility and email support.
And the Pebble, one of the first true-blue smartwatches, is still
trying to build an app ecosystem the way that Google and Apple did for
their smartphones. It's an uphill battle for Pebble, the smartwatch
darling, and it won't get any easier when those tech titans join the
fray.
There's wide agreement that the smartwatch market one day will undergo
its magic moment where the debut of a device hits the right spot between
form, function, and price point and electrifies a somnolent market.
But, while the drumbeat of product rumors is getting louder all the
time, it's still unclear which company will invent a smartwatch that has
the sort of transformational impact that the iPhone had on the mobile
phone business.
The latest
report, however, indicates that Google may soon get a chance to try.
Google Now: A smartwatch's killer feature?
Google's upcoming product is said to be just months away from mass production and the company is placing its bets on its
Google Now virtual assistant,
a wholly different strategy than other smartwatch makers. By focusing
on functionality and a pre-existing platform -- not exclusively design
-- Google reportedly is banking on its ability to make a watch that is
less an expensive accessory to a smartphone and more a device with a
unique utility in its own right. The thinking would be that Google Now,
with its ability to improve its accuracy and deliver information it
thinks we want to see, could be the smartwatch selling point we've been
waiting for.
"If you can put useful information and tailor the service so it's
producing info that people want to access on their wrists, then you may
have a breakout product," said Steve Blum, president of
telecommunications and digital media consultancy firm Tellus Ventures
Associates. "That to me is pretty interesting. The iPhone wouldn't have
been the iPhone without the apps and the data connectivity and all the
things you can now all of sudden do with it."
CNET contacted Google for comment and will update this post when there is more information.
Designing around an information delivery system is a strategy that
Google has used to its advantage elsewhere with the company creating
products, such as
Android phones and notebooks, that contribute to the growth in the number of people using its services -- especially search.
"Paying several hundred dollars for something with novelty value at this
stage isn't in the cards for most folks," Blum said. "But linking it to
a data service, Google is creating that need."
If Google throws
its weight behind its virtual assistant software and tries to ditch the
accessory moniker, Google has the opportunity to tackle a key pricing
issue that plagues wrist-worn wearables: many people don't wear watches
anymore or only wear inexpensive disposables.
"My opinion personally is that I believe Google Now is fantastic," said Myriam Joire,
Pebble's recently-hired product evangelist
and a former Engadget editor. "I think it's amazing and I think it's
going to be a competitive advantage," she added, noting that smartwatch
makers need to be invested in their ecosystem.
"With Pebble, the cross-platform aspect is really important," she said.
"We have strengths nobody else has been able to breach," adding that
cross-platform functionality is coupled the Pebble's battery life and
water-proof body to make for the most consumer-friendly smartwatch on
the market, but still one that functions "as an accessory, companion
experience."
"Samsung's Galaxy Gear -- on top of the limited
number of devices it pairs with -- is too expensive and not quite smart
enough to be the smartwatch trailblazer Google may be poised to become"
We're at a point where Google could forgo extraneous and
costly design elements -- the Gear's large screen or the Pebble's
multi-colored options -- if it manages to market the watch as something
people will find uniquely useful. In other words, if its cheap and
powerful and looks even halfway decent, Google's smartwatch could render
the alternatives undesirable. The Gear, for instance, is at the moment
nothing more than a decently designed but
currently app-less $300 piece of tech jewelry, so the battle wouldn't be hard-fought.
Still, aesthetics are important -- if not potentially paramount -- with wearables. The
Galaxy Note 3 may be larger than your face,
but if you love a big screen to watch video and play games, it's size
is not a problem because it sits in your purse or slides into a back
pocket. A watch, on the other hand, can't be too heavy or clunky, nor
can it involve any substantial trade-offs if it's to be physically
attached to us at all hours of the day. That's another reason why many
wearable watchers like Blum believe that the market for geek fashion
statements is limited -- barring something "wow."
Sarah Rottman Epps, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, thinks
design is perhaps the biggest hurdle because of its intrinsic
relationship with the battery life of small devices.
"Smartwatches are big, honking ugly devices, and I have yet to see
one that a woman would ever wear," she said definitively. "For Google's
watch to succeed, it needs to not only show it's a software company, but
that it's a first class hardware company."
For Rottman Epps, that means factoring in fashion without sacrificing
battery life, a combination she thinks could still be years away.
"Consumers want it all," she said. "They want great battery life, they
want fashion, they want great software and they want it for a really
good price. We haven't seen a smart watch yet that hits on those."
She noted that software and connectivity are getting better, "but if
you're putting a LCD screen on your wrist, it eats battery life and it
also makes the design really clunky. No one has a golden solution for
battery life."
Google's reportedly working to make a device which requires fewer
battery charges, though it's too soon to make any guess as to what it
thinks of as an acceptable level of battery life for a screen-equipped
smartwatch.
A
Google Glass approach is still a win for Android
There's also the slight possibility that Google's smartwatch is not
meant to compete with the Galaxy Gear, the Pebble, or any fitness
offering.
Google has demonstrated in the past that it doesn't care whether it
makes a product that will sell if it's merely interested in the idea
itself. If it wants more people on the Web using Google products, it
will go out and offer
affordable fiber-optic Internet or
air balloon Wi-Fi.
Or if Google sees an opportunity for hyper-specific technology to
trickle down into the mainstream -- Google Glass being the most famous
example -- it will kickoff an entire movement just to see what things
like augmented reality and head-mounted displays can conceivably do for
consumer technology at large. If that were the case, Google could be
making something radically functional, but not meant for the everyday
consumer.
"I wonder how interested Google is in actually making the product
instead of just stirring up the market and demonstrating what it can
do," posited Blum.
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