Wearable smart devices are considered as a new technology product that is being prevalent followed by Smart Phone, within which the Smart Watch is the foregoer. In the recent year, we‘ve been witnesssing the emergence of various smart watches, and the fact that it’s becoming the second screen of smart phone, which actually brings more convenience to people. Additionally, Samsang﹑Apple and Google are about to or at least prepare to get into this field, which probably bring us about the more revolutionary experiences.
However, each product has the process of being mature, just like smart phone, it has eventually been popularized through more then ten years. The smart watches released now mostly seems like semi-manufactures, so maybe it’s better to wait and see than purchase rashly. The followings are some reasons why not invest in smart watches right now:
1.lack of mature hardware standards.
Currently, the most anticipated smart watch is the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Gear on Sep 4th, which does not indicate it is a mature one. In fact, none of the manufacturer comprhends the real standards of an excellent smart watch, even some big firms like Sony whose second generation products were promotely a lot, yet still turned out a not good choice.
Just like the infancy of smart phone, smart watch is still in the stage of the manufacturers being control which lacks of common standards. For example as to the sreen, Samsung uses OLED while the products similar to Pebble adopt E-ink screen. The former owns the better display and multimedia performance, and the latter is more power saving, which are both imperfect.
Some smart watch has built-in SIM card that is capable of accomplishing kinds of fuctions of smart phone independently; while the other ones are merely the second screen of smart phone in which offers the simple fuction of notifications. Although the firstly mentioned smart watch may be the trend in future, the great consumption of microchip will undoutedly affect the usage in the light of the comfort on the wrist. Hence, lacking the mature and unified hardware standard makes smart watch either insufficient in fuctuions or a hot potato, which could not come out a complete outstanding one.
2. The poor battary life
Ultimately, this is a intrinsic problem of the hardware in design which has a fairly great influence on smart watch. For instance, a smart watch shipped with powerful processor and Android-based system might has the same power sonsumption as a smart phone. But with a smaller size it couldn’t equip with a larger-capacity battery, so does that me an we need to seek for the charger only for half day long?
The smart watches with simple fuctions like Pebble nowadays can basiclly be used for 5days, while Sony SmartWatch shipped with 1.6-inch 220×176 pixel display is only able to last for 3 days. Imagining a duel-core processor or even larger OLED screen of 2.5-inch of Samsung Galaxy Gear, its battery life could probably achieve 10 hours.
Therefore, the present situation is that the battery techniques and microchip power consumption haven’t achieve much improvement, so it’s really hard to make sure which smart watch is better. Apparently, the one with simple fuctions is unattractive but the powerful one with frequent battery charging is obviously unpractical, which is really a dilemma for users.
3. Immature system
The present smart watches can be classified into two categories: one is adopted Android system, the other is the specialized system. The former has better fuctional performance, but still has no its specialized version, for after all Google hasn’t released one; while the closed-system of the latter requires the customized Apps, so the problem of the platform is a matter of concern.
4. lacking specialized software resources
Relative to system, software resources is as well insufficiency. Since the mobile platform has not yet optimized the smart watch, so the manufacturers definitely have more work to do. As for a holonomic platform, its really a long way to go.
5. Low cost-performance ratio
The smart watches now are generally priced higher than $150 which is quite expensive as a dispensable accessory of smart phones. The first generation of digital products is always priced high before developing a stable market, and its immature user experiences could almost make you regretful.
To sum up, new electronic products need more time to develop and be mature, so maybe in the future one or two years, some relatively well-performed and easy-to-use smart wathes will be released and being popularized.
