Artificial intelligence 'will save wearables'! When a technology hype flops, do you think the industry can use it as a learning experience? A time of self-examination? An opportunity to pause and reflect on making the next consumer or business tech hype a bit less stupid? Don't be silly. What it does is pile the next hype on to the last hype, and call it "Hype 2.0". " …
AI will save wearables!
No, blockchain will!
No, AI
BLOCKCHAIN!
AI!!1!
BVOAKICHAIN!@!!1! I WIN!!!
crap.
So, there you have it, blockchain will save wearables. Blockchain wins in round 3 of the finals. Thanks for supporting live sport chat! See you next time. Cheerio.
The simple fact is that everybody wearing a watch is no longer a thing & hasn't been since cell phones became hugely popular.
Wrist mounted devices are destined to be a niche product for the foreseeable future, and the market will be split between very simple & technology heavy.
Lots of people want just a simple activity monitor etc, so they want very light, very long battery life & usually cheap, possibly with some extra sensors added in. Those people don't want some big heavy bulky short battery life expensive device.
There are those that would like a full featured productivity device on their wrist (I love the Samsung Gear 2), but it needs to be tailored to them more & not full of cheap gimmicky "features" and needs to be able to be customized to make it fit exactly how you want it & what features you want active.
Now when there is a huge advance in technology and you can wear a wrist watch that has a pop out holographic projection display that works in sunlight & has touch feedback, so it replaces the phone almost completely, then we might see that start to become the new normal instead of cell phones, but till then, it's a niche & specific market.
... unfortunately the wearables market kinda has skipped the "early adopters" phase, so nobody has a clue what to do with such devices. Instead they jumped from "unobtainable" to "big budget mass market" devices which are all alike.
What would have been needed was a phase of experimentation. A phase where it's easy to program and perhaps to add new hardware to it. Have a simple product like this out for a couple of years so a community can form around it... just like with home computers in the 1980s. Don't aim for the mass market yet.
That was what the Pebble tried (and failed) to be.
You would have needed a bigger Pebble, and several of them, so to speak. The home computer/PC analogy works quite well here. If you started dabbling with computers in the early 1980ies, you had a lot of choice. Most of the names are forgotten now, but there was a wide range, and with local flavour too. Depending on your goals, budget and inclination, anything from 'build your own' to 'off the shelf high performance' was availiable. And, and this is the important bit, you could write your own software. And if you knew you wanted a computer, but didn't really know what for, you'd get one that you could play games on.
And wearables never really went through that phase.
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