Josh On Design

I’ve been wearing an Android or Apple Watch for a few months now and I’ve come to one conclusion. While you don’t want to buy these quite yet, when the good version comes out in a few years we will all become superheroes.

As smartwatches have slowly faded into existence from their sci-fi past, I have always wondered: what is the killer app? What is the feature (or actual app) that would do something so useful I’d wear it on my wrist, put up with a mostly-off screen and laggy voice control, learn a new interface, and charge it daily. What would it do that makes me want to actually buy one despite the limitations?  After living with my Apple Watch for a few weeks I think I finally know. The watch itself is the killer app.

Today I received my Apple Watch. Compared to the three Android Wear watches and a few fitness sensors, I can safely say it’s the first smart watch that merely sucks instead of being truly horrible. All of these devices will continue to get better and better, longer battery life, simplified UI, etc.  Soon we won’t know how we lived without them. But that’s not important right now. What’s important is when we look back in history we will say 2015 is the day we started to wire up humanity.

Smartwatches are coming. By Christmas they will be everywhere. And we won't know how we ever lived without them. Or so we are told to believe. But if you were a company making a smartwatch, how would you know what features to build? How would you know which features will fit the "something people didn't know they wanted" category? You have to predict the future. Turns out, that's hard.

Note: The first half of this post was written before the Apple Watch event and the second half after. I wanted to capture my thoughts before they were polluted by endless "reviewers" proclaiming the genius/delusion of Tim Cook. I almost didn’t want to write this because I knew my conclusion would be that you can’t review any technology this personal without using it for a while, and here I am reviewing a device I haven’t personally used. That said, I think this represents more of my thoughts on the category rather than Apple Watch in particular, a category that is going to bigger than we expect. So... here goes.