Functional ribbed, low experience, smart watch IoT future will have how much imagination space?

Recently, the long-dormant smartwatch market has been bustling again.

Huawei and OPPO announced the launch of new smartwatches, and Meizu, which has never been involved in this category, also launched their first product. Such a tight product release rhythm makes it easy for us to detect that manufacturers want to get a share of the smartwatch market.

But one issue that can't be avoided is how much potential there is in the smartwatch market since Apple launched the Apple Watch, which has been a highly contentious topic.

Supporters argue that because smartwatches are so portable, they will be the most important entry point to the IoT era, and that they will be upgraded with product iterations and eventually become a must-have on par with cell phones.

However, six years after the launch of the first Apple Watch, the smartwatch market is still lukewarm, and consumer attitudes towards these products are confused and not fundamentally transformed by product iterations.

So what exactly is it that has caused the smartwatch market to remain lukewarm over the years?

As a product worn on the wrist like a bracelet, a smartwatch requires two hands to operate, and one-handed operation can only be done to lift the hand to see the time on the screen or to browse through push notifications, which is contrary to the mainstream tech products advocating for "freeing up your hands".

Manufacturers are naturally aware of this problem, and have added voice assistants to smartwatches that work just like cell phones, allowing them to do most of the work just by using their mouths. But these voice assistants require an internet connection, which means that smartwatches like the Xiaomi Color have to be connected to the phone at all times to use the voice assistant properly.

In addition, in order to solve the problem of the watch not being able to connect to the Internet on its own, the eSIM version launched by the manufacturer has become less affordable than the regular version. Apple Apple Watch 6, for example, the GPS version of the normal price of 3199 yuan, while the eSIM version is 800 yuan more expensive. Meanwhile, the eSIM service itself requires a fee.

It's no exaggeration to say that such a high cost of ownership and use has already priced many consumers out of the market, not to mention that the functionality of smartwatch voice assistants at this stage of the game is still very limited, and extremely testing of network stability and users' Mandarin levels.

Because of the positioning of the "watch", in addition to the problem of having to operate with both hands to be able to use it properly, it also leads to the screen dial size can not be infinitely large as the cell phone screen. Today, the Apple Watch 6's largest 44mm dial comes with a screen size of just 1.78 inches.

A particularly small screen not only makes it laborious for the user's fingers to operate, but also has a particularly noticeable impact on its ability to display the most important information.

Because the screen is small, if the display is small, it is highly likely that the user will need to get close to see it, but if the display is too large, it will not be able to show much of anything on the screen, and you will have to swipe the screen to see the whole thing.

This puts the user in a dilemma, and makes smartwatches the "original sin" that they can't break free from.

When a smartwatch's external capabilities (hardware and interaction) are not as good as they should be due to inherent factors, its internal capabilities - the software experience - are also "like chicken ribs".

There are many operating systems for smartwatches, including WatchOS, WearOS, TizenOS, Android, and RTOS. Unfortunately, the wide range of operating systems has not resulted in a blossoming effect, and has created a lot of obstacles for the development of smartwatches.

First, there is the issue of the app ecosystem. There are only two mainstream operating systems left in the cell phone market, iOS and Android, and app developers only need to adapt to these two systems. There is no dominant operating system in the smartwatch market, so it's "a tough decision" for developers to give up on either system.

If you have to adapt so many systems, it's an extremely burdensome task for both the company and the individual, so selectively giving up and not synchronizing updates became the choice of most software companies, which led to a low number of apps and slow adaptation and update speeds, and became a pain in the neck for smartwatch operating systems.

In addition to the lack of third-party app support, the small body of the smartwatch also makes it difficult to make the built-in battery bigger, which in turn leads to the problem of short battery life of smartwatches in general. For example, the 44mm Apple Watch 6 is equipped with a 1.17 Wh battery, which makes "one charge per day" a daily task for users.

For this problem, Huawei and Xiaomi gave the solution of adopting a lightweight RTOS, which has a very obvious power-saving effect compared to a complex system like WatchOS. The Huawei GT2 watch achieves up to two weeks of battery life, which is 18 times longer than the Apple Watch 6.

However, this isn't something Huawei and Xiaomi should be bragging about, because while RTOS is lightweight and power-efficient, it's also a step back in terms of experience.

As the same OS as the smart bracelet, RTOS has a significant performance disadvantage, and when paired with a high-resolution display, animation dropouts and slow response times have become the norm for RTOS watches, and as a result, the experience of using watch apps is significantly worse than with watchOS.

But poor app ecosystems and battery life are not the most pressing shortcomings that smartwatches need to make up for, and the lack of core features is the biggest problem.

In recent years, healthcare has become the main focus of wearable devices, as the on-the-go healthcare market is still a vast blue ocean. High-end smartwatches, represented by Apple Watch 6, have also introduced features such as oximetry, heart rate detection, and sleep monitoring as their main selling points.

However, these features are not exclusive to smartwatches, and smart bracelets priced at only two to three hundred dollars have the same features, and while there is an absolute advantage in price, according to the relevant data, the accuracy of the body data from the two tests is very similar. And because of the smaller size of the smart bracelet, longer wear more senseless and longer battery life, can provide users with continuous, stable detection data report, compared to the smart watch detection function to do better.

At this point, it's clear why the smartwatch market has remained lukewarm for many years.

The positioning of "watch" allows it to be accepted by some users as an alternative to traditional watches, but its own cumbersome operation, inefficient display of information, imperfect system ecosystems, and poor battery life also make its actual experience not as good as the users imagined.

If these shortcomings just now only make consumers think more about buying a smartwatch, then the lack of features is the ultimate reason to completely cancel the purchase.

A few times the price of a smartphone can only buy a product with similar functionality to a bracelet, which is not a rational, affordable option for consumers, not to mention the vision of replacing a cell phone, which is what supporters say.

Wearables are a big market, full of endless imagination, but not every wearable product category has an endless future, the development of many years but has been lukewarm smartwatch, for the current users, is it really just a transitional product?