Apple Pocket Phone
There was a time when “watch” meant a pocket watch.
Wrist watches first appeared in the late 1800’s as women’s jewelry. World War I soldiers and aviators, needing to co-ordinate maneuvers, saw the utility of glanceable wristwatches. From a NYTimes article on the subject, “an officer reportedly complained that operating a pocket watch was difficult when timing a bombardment.”
Today, we have to say pocket watch to mean those timepieces on a chain in a waistcoat.
When wrist watches appeared, pocket watches disappeared. That is until they returned as cell phones and smart phones. Then wrist watches became scarce.
I’m an early adopter of smart watches. I still have one of my Casio DataBank watches from the 80’s, and somewhere I have my very first digital watch. Its red seven-segment LEDs were powered on-demand to save on precious battery life. Some things never change.
More recently, I backed the Pebble kickstarter campaign as a developer. I’m sheepishly proud to admit that wearing my orange Pebble for 1.5 years, I exhausted its vibrating motor. It’s totally out of vibratrons, so I’ve dropped back to my original developer edition Pebble.
I love my Pebble.
Smartwatch:Smartphone::Wristwatch:Pocket Watch1
Focus on just glanceability and notification for a moment. For short bits of information like a discreet alarm, for looking at a Tweet, screening caller ID, or checking the time (!), here’s a smart watch’s glanceable utility: A smart watch is as much of an improvement over a smart phone as a wrist watch was over a pocket watch.
Yes, there’s other functionality that’s useful, like activity trackers and sleep trackers. New apps are being invented every day. Add authentication and authorization (e.g. payments, vehicle ignition) and the wearable gets personally powerful. I’m bullish on wearables,2 and glanceability is the just initial hook.
Recall that a generation ago, this original 1983 Compaq was considered a portable computer at 28 pounds (13 kg). I’ll go out on a limb and say that in the future, our point of view will be similarly shifted. Power capacity, radiated power efficiency, UX, text input, and 2-way communication will need innovation, but the bracelet form factor will prevail. I’ll be telling my grandkids, when rummaging through the attic they unearth the musty, rigid, non-origami-folded, brittle, watt-gulping, non-corneal-direct display iPhone 6, “Oh that? It’s an Apple Pocket Phone.”
UPDATE: 2015-01-30 Grammar edits, clarifications. Focus on glanceability. Add link to TI watch. Thanks to Patrick, Steve, and Ana for feedback and comments.