I (and a lot of other people, it has to be said) have been tracking how mobile devices are driving consolidation of the devices and gadgets that we have in our lives. In this post (just re-posted from my internal IBM blog) I have listed a few of the things that died or are near death as their function has been replaced, such as alarm clocks, diaries, and the like.
In the news at the moment is talk of watches becoming extensions of your mobile device, and this is an interesting trend.
We see this in audio equipment, you can “extend” your mobile phone into the car or the home stereo and/or TV.
these audio extensions work because they provide utility (listen to music in your car) or a far better experience, listening on the big speakers of your hifi.
Watches, glasses and other wearable kit make a lot sense* because it is often impracticable or unsafe to take out your phone. So checking status (who was that SMS from, how many emails, incoming call details, alarms etc etc.
This may become even more useful if we start to get the “superphone” type device as outlined by Ubuntu, these are devices that are powerful enough to be your main computer, as well as your phone, and as such will connect to a screen and keyboard/mouse to make up your personal computer.
When this happens the device must still be able to be a phone, take and receive calls, with alacrity, and crystal clearness, regardless of what else it is doing. This is because communications over the phone are severely hampered when there is a time lag, breakup or other crapiness.
So, back to watches, if my phone is my laptop then having the ability to check some things on my watch makes a lot of sense.
Hopefully they will use a low energy radio like Bluetooth LE and a simple reliable messaging format like MQTT or JINI, so that you are not having to change the watch battery very often, that would be a bad thing.
* this may make sense to me because I am old enough to have worn a watch for many years, and so like the idea of it being clever.
Posted in: mobile
All Things Mobile 
Posted on March 19, 2013
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