Smart devices and wearables

Are wearables the next big thing? Eventually, yes. But the benefits have to significantly outweigh the issues. My old Nokia 2110 phone could go without a charge for 5 days. Nearly all smartphones last less than 24 hours. Phone charging has become a cultural thing, be it the nest of cables in that part of the kitchen at home, or the sponsored pillar in the departure lounge. We don't mind because the utility of our smart phones is is massively greater than our old mobile phones. But will the same be said for wearables?

The concepts are brilliant: I love the short advertising movies about all the cool stuff you can do with your watch/glasses. But none of them mentions battery life. The Apple watch video mentions, at one point, the ability to monitor your health 'all day'. Google Glasses' battery life is about 3 hours. My Casio ProTrek PRW-3000 never needs charging (it's solar powered) and, in addition to monitoring temperature, atmospheric pressure and my direction, it is calibrated to an atomic clock every night. So it offers a bunch of useful to marginally-useful features for free, effectively. I don't need to disrupt my life worrying about whether it's charged, or accurate, or needs an update. It's a watch. We already have phones for portable smart stuff. They are so ubiquitous they might as well be wearable. So the real questions are:

1. What are the watches/glasses going to give me that my phone doesn't already?
2. Will it be worth the hassle of charging them at least once a day?

The mass market answers are, and will be for some years to come: 1. not much; 2. no.

Now, when the solar-powered ones, with colour e-ink screens start rolling out, then we have Watch 2.0. Until then, feel free to keep giggling at the chunky wrist and head gear crowd constantly looking for charging points.

As for the current set of portable smart stuff, the key advantage that Android has over iOS is choice. Not just a plethora of hardware options, but OS choices too - from roll-your-own to plain vanilla. And as Google get to grips with their Nexus line, and their Nest products, they may supersede Apple by addressing their core offering: no-fuss, tightly-integrated smart devices.

Don't get me wrong: I love Apple devices. I love the design, the childlike simplicity of them - they all pass the 'granny' test, unlike... well, any of my Android devices. But the business model irritates me. No, not the 30% App Store tax. That's just pricing. It's the disingenuity: Apple say that they want a seamless customer experience, unsullied by 3rd parties' lesser offerings. So why disallow users to buy Kindle books in the Amazon iApp? Because it competes with iBooks. Or disallow the Google Voice app? Because it competes with their network partners.

This is hardly 'doing what's best for customers'. It's doing what's best for Apple in the short term. In the long run it allows complacency to creep in because, as in sport, if you don't continue to compete with the best, on equal terms, you lose your edge. So, it's a finite game, highly dependent on lack of user tech-sophistication: such users want Apple to make the smart choices for them. But as their tech knowledge/skills evolve, they seek to make their own choices. iOS 8 is starting to open up, with 3rd party keyboards, and 3rd parties allowed to have space in the Notifications area. But you still get the sense that they are conceding ground grudgingly, rather than keeping the playing field level and beating their competitors through better products. On the hardware side, Apple still make the highest grade (and highest margin) devices on the market, but as the size and shape of smart device choices start to multiply (you can get a screen for just about every inch between 3.5 and 12 inches), one wonders whether they can keep up.

So where does the Apple watch fit in? Contrary to prevailing (fawning?) journalism, I think this is Apple playing catch-up. They are a hardware business at heart, after all, so if they don't have a wearable offering they could be in trouble. This is something that Google don't need to worry about because their platform is open: if they don't build it, someone else will, using their platform. It might compete with their own offering, but that just means they have to evolve faster.

And for the reasons mentioned at the start of this note, wearables will be all about speed of evolution.