Smartwatches have a lot of exciting functions, but sales are, shall we say, “steady” so far rather than massive. General consumers are struggling to see why they’d need one. “Surely it’s just a tiny phone that you strap to your wrist?” they cry.
Thing is, that’s more or less what everyone said about tablets just four years ago. Now everyone has one.
So what’s going to nudge smartwatches over the tipping point and into wild success? Here are the features hardware and software developers are working on right now that will soon be in the Apple Watch, Moto 360, LG G Watch R, Asus ZenWatch and the rest.
Control your house and everything else
You can already control your home heating with a Pebble or Android Wear piece, so long as you have a Nest smart thermostat and the right app. Oh, and you can start certain cars.
The smart home market is another area with massive potential, but where punters aren’t yet really biting. Tech brands would love to see home-based IoT provide smartwatches with their first real killer apps. And to that end, it surely won’t be long until you can heat the oven, fade the lights up and down, monitor your home security cameras and adjust your heating and music settings from your tech timepiece.
The big noise at the moment on this front is “Works with Nest”, the system devised by Google’s Nest that lets other sorts of devices be controlled using its own brand of commands. The important bit here is that it creates a standard that other smart gadgets can sign up to, rather than trying — and often failing — to do the job themselves.
With Samsung going balls out for IoT connectivity in 2015 and Sony et al using Android in their tellies, we’re confident most of this and next year’s TVs will be controllable via your Android Wear watch as well.
Just because Nest is owned by Google doesn’t mean the Apple Watch will be left in the lurch. There’s already a Nest app on iOS, while Apple’s own HomeKit waits in the wings.
Improve your health, save your life
Okay, there is some doubt that smartwatches, and wearables in general, will become massive as consumer devices. However, if legislation and medical practice allow, they will be massive in the health field.
An early application that could be genuinely life-changing is monitoring glucose levels for diabetics.
Google has already shown off a smart contact lens that constantly monitors your glucose levels, while Samsung has said it’s looking into non-invasive ways to do the same in future versions of is Gear watch line. The Gear S already monitors your heart rate, UV levels and air pressure.
Interestingly, a diabetes-monitoring watch can lay claim to being one of the very first “smartwatches”. The Cygnus GlucoWatch, released way back in 2002, monitored glucose levels through the skin every 10 minutes. It wasn’t perfect, with less immediate results and lower accuracy than the standard finger-prick test.
The current state of the art: there’s an app from DexCom lined up for the Apple Watch that receives data from DexCom’s tiny sensors, which actually sit beneath the skin.
Smartwatch makers and app/accessory developers would doubtless love to monitor our health in all sorts of ways. However, once you move beyond the current low-level fitness monitoring devices, you run into a brick wall of government regulation. And let’s face it, if you relied on a smartwatch HR monitor for medical-grade health updates, you’d probably spend a lot of time in A&E on precautionary visits.
Wrist-mounted projectors
As the mill pond of wearables become a great swirling ocean of tech, some brands are trying extremely hard to stand out. Trying harder than most is the Ritot, the first projection watch.
Pre-release images suggest the Apple Watch will have a “torch”, but this is a big step above that. However, before you get too excited, it’s not going to project a little hologram of your housemate asking you to buy milk, like Princess Leia on downtime. Instead, it fires a watch-like display across your wrist and hand.
In the demo photos we’ve seen to date, this has mostly involved projecting the time, but there are plans to embed fitness tracking too, showing your heart rate perhaps, or motivating messages such as, “run faster, fatty,” if you don’t keep up the pace.
Notifications and social updates are on the cards too: you could literally be wearing your whole digital life on your sleeve in no time.
The Ritot is a crowdfunded project that totally destroyed its funding target back in September 2014 – it asked for $50,000; it came away with $1.4 million.
The future for smartwatches or a silly gimmick? Well, the Ritot isn’t doing any favours for itself, with its claims of 20 different projection colours and being “ABSOLUTELY SAFE”, giving it the vibe of something you might pick up down the market. Still, plenty of people are buying into the idea.
Pay for everything
Is the mobile payments revolution finally about to take off? We’ve been waiting long enough for it.
When NFC first popped into phones back in 2010 with Android mobiles such as the Gear S, we thought, “well this seems like the future.” But here we are, actually in the future, and it’s barely gained traction.
That could be about to change with the arrival of Apple Watch and Apple Pay, which lets you essentially use an iPhone or Apple Watch like the contactless part of your credit/debit card.
This makes even more sense for a watch than a phone as the watch is always just there on your wrist, gagging to be swiped. Apple Pay’s rolled out in the US already, with the UK to follow this year.
Rival services including Google Wallet and Plaso the lower-tech CurrentC system favoured by big US retailers will also be battling for share of this potentially very lucrative space.
Travel without a travel card
One other great possibility for NFC-enabled smart watches is already in place on phones, with the EE Cash app already letting you pay for tube and train travel in London.
The infrastructure is already there, right in the Oyster readers found at stations, with boring old contactless bank cards driving the wireless payments revolution so far.
Contactless cards can do already what we expect to see smartwatches doing a bit further down the line, without the irritation of having to fish your card out of your wallet as you battle through a rush-hour human tide.
Colour screens without daily charging
One big issue many users and potential users have with smartwatches, is that some of them don’t even last as long as our phones. The Pebble lasts a week, but if you want a nice, colourful screen, you’ll need to charge at least daily with most of the available smartwatches, and more than likely Apple’s effort too.
However, Sharp may have a (sort of) solution. In November 2014, it showed off a new smartwatch screen technology that it claims is 1,000 times more efficient than that of current colour LCDs.
However, it can only display eight colours rather than the millions an LG G Watch R has at its disposal. Still, that’s seven more than the Pebble can currently show, and it would work great in any forthcoming, next-gen Pebble watch (Sharp already makes the e-ink one in the Pebble Steel)…
The Qualcomm Toq already offers a low-power colour Mirasol display, but that watch was flushed down the tech toilet into obscurity before it was even properly released. Sharp’s new LCD-based tech has a real chance of longevity, and not just in battery life terms. While you might not think of Sharp as a big name anymore – especially if you’re in Europe which it’s all but abandoned – it created the LTPS tech used in the iPhone 6 screen.
Let your loved ones know you’re thinking of them…
…And are not dead. Want to be a little bit sick in your mouth? A feature of Apple’s Watch – and apparently some at Apple consider it a key feature – is that you can send little vibratey signals between Watches to let your nearest and dearest know you’re thinking about them. You can even send your heartrate reading to let them know you’re still alive. Or just to show off how impressively low your resting heart rate.
Much more fun, and a good source for mischief, is being able to send doodles to other Watch owners. Again, this will come inbuilt from day one. We’ll give you three guesses as to what our first doodle will be.
Android Wear currently doesn’t offer this sort of surface-level interpersonal fun, but when the world goes wild for it, ahem, you can expect to see similar takes on the idea sprout up everywhere among smartwatches and their apps. Location-aware doodle dating must be on the cards.
