I wonder about the Apple Watch, as I find it difficult to imagine what it will be good for. It has to make do with an extremely small output area, which means that it can only compete against the iPhone in cases where the interaction is so short that the convenience of having a 2 to 3 second faster access wins out against the much better experience you could provide with the iPhone, or the information that needs to be processed is so small that it can comfortably fit onto the watch.
These activities are pretty limited:
- Authentication is probably the killer app: it could replace all the keys and the credit cards you own with an inherently more secure solution. Ideally it would also replace our IDs, and it could replace all our computer logins.
- “What’s up?” is also an important task to master: seeing a reminder for your next appointment, for puplic transport times, the weather, or walking/cycling directions are quite helpful. For some seeing who is calling/texting might be essential, but for me it would be just annoying, while the reverse would be brilliant, having the watch figure out whether it is good time to interrupt me and tell my callers.
- Remote control for small things: controlling the TV, changing the temperature, preheating the car, …
- fitness tracking is an obvious point, including replacing the iPod as your music source during exercise. A smallish, but lucrative niche to get the watch of the ground, with some nice halo effect as well.
- And of course telling the time, and the other functions of the clock app.
It will be interesting to watch this evolve, as I feel there is a huge risk of providing too many small functions cluttering the interface, making access so slow that you’d rather use the phone. Also the interface itself looks quite limited: you have the touchscreen, with your thumb obscuring most of the screen, or the crown which is only one dimension and could be difficult to use when strapped on the wrist. It seems to me that having more than a dozen apps to choose from will be painfully slow. All of this points to a very restrained role the watch will be playing compared to the phone, a role which will only require quite limited hardware resources, and so see much longer upgrade cycles than the iPhone.