watches based on the iPod nano design
Back in December, we started to see rumors about an upcoming Apple Watch. As you may have seen, a number of iPad nano users have been using their devices as watches, and to be fair, there is a certain (temporary) coolness to seeing one of those with a nice bracelet, but if Apple was to built an actual product designed to be a watch from the get go, that would be a radical move for that company.The first question of course, is: what would it do? With chip technology ever improving, a watch can be a small computer and pretty much do any computing tasks assigned to it (given enough memory and storage), but maybe it could be voice-controlled and the classic idea for a smart watch is that it talks to your phone to display information (notifications, calendar meetings…) without having to reach your phone. Hopefully, Apple would “surprise us”, but given the relative weakness of Siri, I sure hope that it won’t be voice powered.
Most of those concepts have been explore before, and typically, they failed because the added-value was not high enough, and the friction proved to be too great: there’s too much setup, the battery life was too low and the screen too small. I’m just about sure that Apple can improve the design, and some technological aspects of the problem, but in the end, the screen is still too small and there’s no immediate solution to the battery life (e-paper display may help…).
And I’m sure that Apple is looking at the idea since the company wants products that can be mass-marketed, and clearly everybody knows what a watch is. That said, “playing with the idea” (according to the New York Times and the wall street journal) and announcing a product anytime soon are two very different things. I don’t think that an iWatch is coming soon, but if it were to be launched, what would you want an Apple watch to do?
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