Since the late ’90s when mobile phones started to become commonplace, the original purpose of a watch has become more or less redundant. Let’s face it, you really don’t need one once you’ve got a device in your pocket pretty much 24/7 which you check on a regular basis for messages and are therefore made almost constantly aware of the time. They have instead become the tool of fashion statement like a fedora or lens-less glasses, until now that is. The smart watch promises to reinvent the potential of your wrist to deliver you information which is only a pocket’s reach otherwise, however it does also simultaneously reduce it’s potential for individual style that high end timepieces currently give it. Every Samsung Galaxy Gear looks like an ugly Galaxy Gear, no matter what strap you opt for (no you can’t swap it out either) just like every iPhone looks like an iPhone.
So what are they really for? What gap do they fill? The smart watch can be seen to resemble our inability to communicate with computers in the way we find most natural and effective, through speech. This is currently a mere technical limitation, one which is soon likely to be overcome as can already be seen in the guise of Microsoft’s hugely powerful if currently gimped ‘kinect’ sensor for Xbox One. However, I feel the limitation is also of a social nature, as shown by the backlash to Google Glass. It is not just the discomfort people feel about possibly being filmed without their knowledge, it’s also that same social disconnect you get when there’s someone walking towards you talking on a hands-free phone, you can’t tell until they’re close whether or not they’re just insane and talking to themselves, people just aren’t ready to talk to machines yet. So instead the smart-watch makes it obvious that we’re not insane by forcing the user to bring their wrist to their face, or at least poke at it. Until an innovator (read apple) develops a truly fashionably desirable or meaningfully useful feature, smart watches will struggle to get past being a gimmick. That’s not to say they won’t fly off the shelves though.
