By Daniel Cooper / Source: Engadget

Since the launch of the iPod, Apple’s either dominated or come close to dominating every industry that it has entered. The only market where the company isn’t the world number one is in set-top boxes, a field that has always been described as a “hobby.” It’s not too much of a risk to think that Apple will do to watches what it’s already done to personal audio, smartphones and tablets — even if global success isn’t overnight. What then, for everyone else in the world of wearable technology?

Design

Apple, along with the recently announced Pebble Time, is swimming against the current when it comes to hardware design. If you were sitting in the room during Google I/O ‘14, you’d have felt a palpable wave of excitement when the Moto 360 was unveiled. The world’s first circular smartwatch with an LCD display instantly blew the “squircle” shaped Gear Live and G Watch into the margins. From this moment onward, companies were desperate to demonstrate that their watches were more “watch-like” than the competition. Now, almost every company in the space is doing its best to shed their geeky image in the hope of garnering some love from the mainstream.

The world’s first circular smartwatch with an LCD display instantly blew the “squircle” shaped Gear Live and G Watch into the margins.
In the last six months, we’ve seen products like Withings’ Activité, the Huawei Watch and LG’s G Watch Urbane all try to ape traditional watches. Good aesthetics aside, it’s also good business, since these devices have one eye on appealing to the sort of consumers who would ordinarily be putting down $5,000 for an Omega Seamaster.

The Apple Watch Edition is destined to do similar, drawing the eye of rich executives and millionaires away from their traditional Swiss mainstays. Given that the premium Apple Watch can cost up to $17,000, it wouldn’t take too many user defections, presumably from Rolex to Apple, before Switzerland’s profits began to tumble. Apple’s chief designer Jonathan Ive himself is quoted by The New York Times as saying that the country would be “in trouble,” when his wearable launched — although the designer reportedly used a slightly stronger, six-letter expletive while doing so.

Several of the country’s smaller outfits have, belatedly, woken up to the idea that technology companies are muscling in on their turf. Three lesser-known brands, Mondaine, Alpina and Frédérique Constant, are pushing against this by adding basic activity tracking to a new series of smartwatches. Launching under the MotionX banner, the watches include activity tracking, goals, alerts and sleep monitoring as standard.

Battery Life

It’s a good rule of thumb that if a smartwatch has less than, say, three days of battery life, it was made by “mobile” people. If it has a life greater than seven or so days, then it’s more likely to have been made by a watch company. Startups specifically entering the smartwatch market, on the other hand, normally feel that a week is roughly what users will be able to live with. You can tell that the Apple Watch sits firmly in the former camp, with an expectation that you’ll charge it on a daily basis. Of course, given that it’s a product designed by Ive, you’ll probably expect to charge it once every six hours.

Companies have to work out the best trade-off between battery life and features.
In all honesty, the technology required to make a smartphone for your wrist already exists. Unfortunately, the power necessary to make it work for long periods of time is so great that your whole wrist would be covered by a battery. Companies have to work out the best trade-off between battery life and features, such as Apple’s decision not to include the energy-heavy GPS in its wearable. A few devices have tried to do all of these things at once, but they wind up looking a lot like the Neptune Pine.

Despite big advances in low-power wireless technology (step forward, Bluetooth 4.0 LE) enabling watches to use a cell battery to talk to your phone, no one’s really cracked the power issue. Until then, we’ll all have to ration our time spent noodling away at our smartwatches. After all, we’d hate to get into a situation where Mophie-style smartwatch batteries are a thing we all have to buy.

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