If the nerds from “The Big Bang Theory” designed consumer electronics, no doubt they’d have invented the smartwatch. Need to store spaceship blueprints and also order a pizza? How about a wrist-top computer!
For the rest of us, though, the smartwatch has been a hammer without a nail, a tinier-screen replacement for the phone that’s already grafted to our hands. But as it turns three, the smartwatch is evolving to be more useful. How? By becoming, well, a watch—something you’d rarely use for more than a second at a time.