I've never used any of these before but I would love to get the Platysens Marlin connected swim cap gadget.
Have you used any of these? Are there any products you'd add to the list?
I've seen a lot of sites that say the Apple Watch stole the show earlier this week. I'm inclined to agree. However, I think this article might be taking it a little far when it claims that the Apple Watch is the future of Apple. Since it requires the iPhone, it seems like the iPhone would still be king. However, it might make people more inclined to purchase iPhones. I don't know if that will be the case though since both cost a pretty penny. What do you think?
When it comes to the wearables market, smartwatches and fitness trackers take the cake as the most dominant segment. From the biggest names in tech to the smallest fringe brands, consumers won’t crave for choice and diversity when it comes to smart gadgetry to be worn on the wrist. However, it’s the smart clothing segment that is being touted by a lot of tech enthusiasts and experts as the catalyst for the future despite not so enviable sales numbers.
Smart watches have found their niche beyond the tech world in the athletics department but smart clothes still haven’t found its position in the market. This makes it very difficult to market outside of the tech community. But, as the technology evolves and becomes more and more easy to use for non-tech junkies, it may begin to see the light of day.
At the end of the day, that seamlessness is what all great technologies strive for. When cellular phones were clunky and conspicuous, no one used it. But when it shrunk in size and improved in functionality, it began a crazy maelstrom of success for phone manufacturing companies such as Apple and Samsung. We can see this trend in how Apple Watch Series 3’s functions overlap with those of smartphone’s.
Smart clothes are already seamless. It’s only a matter of packing the relevant tech in them that needs to be accomplished for it to become bigger than the smartwatch and a major segment in the wearables market.
It’s the best form-factor for health tracking purposes
Smartwatches and fitness trackers are not necessary for peak physical performance. Some athletes even prefer to compete without them on. Clothes, on the other hand, aside from being necessities in modern competition, have the ability to enhance an athlete’s physical performance be it through muscle compression or body heat management.
This makes smart clothes for sport an extremely important segment. It can basically beat smartwatches and fitness trackers at their own game with the right technological advancements in place.
We’re starting to see that take shape.
The Nadi X Yoga Pants, for example, helps yoga practitioners perfect their form by letting the wearer know when their body alignment is off when engaged in particular poses. The figure hugging tights vibrate to alert you. This way, wearers won’t need yoga instructors to correct their poses during their workouts.
Smart clothing also includes shoes.
For this segment, we already have the Under Armour HOVR Sonic and HOVR Phantom sneakers. These smart shoes allow users to track their workout statistics even if they don’t take a smartphone with them on their workout.
Once the workout is done, the stats will be uploaded via a mobile application to the wearer’s smartphone when it’s available at the end of the workout. This eliminates the need for athletes to bring their phones with them that can get cumbersome after a while of workouts.
It’s not a cumbersome tech add-on
When it comes to gadgets and technology, ease-of-use is always a top priority. Smart clothes will always have an advantage in this regard because clothing is something humans know intuitively how to use. The “smart” features, on the other hand, are a different story.
This is the concept behind Levi’s Commuter Jacket with Jacquard, a smart jacket that the famous denim brand made in collaboration with Google. The jacket doesn’t only make it easier to bring a new piece of tech hardware around, it also makes interacting with the gadgets that you already have so much easier.
It allows the wearer to engage certain functions of your smartphone without ever needing to take it out of your bag. It can, for example, enable you to skip the current song playing on your phone through gesture controls. The smart jacket can also screen your calls for you so you don’t have to bring your phone out of your bag just to reject a call.
Furthermore, smart clothes have the potential to be powered by alternative means. Thermoelectric technology for example, can help provide power to the clothes. This eliminates the need for extra chargers for your gadgets.
It has endless application potential
Perhaps its inability to hold on to a particular niche market can become one of its best assets. Not having a mold to try to fit into, smart clothes are more free to go wherever there is need to innovate. Smartwatches and fitness trackers have already settled in to their place as an athlete’s gadget, but smart clothes still have no established niche market yet. This enables it to branch out to other untapped markets.
Sure, it has a bunch of applications for athletes as well but there are many other applications for smart clothes. Fashion, for example, is a huge consideration when it comes to smart clothes. To this end, manufacturers have invented fabric that can change colors at the tap of a smartphone.
Smart clothing also has a huge potential in the healthcare industry. Smart clothes that give the sensation of a hug to stressed out down syndrome sufferers for example, is already in the market. Other related applications include smart clothes that monitor health.
Conclusion
While smartwatches and fitness trackers are today’s favorite flavor of wearables, smart clothes just have all the opportunities to take that crown and hold on to it for a long time.
For one thing, it can beat smartwatches and fitness trackers at their own game. It can better track health data as seen in the HOVR sneakers without holding an athlete back. In some cases, it can even help athletes achieve peak physical performance.
They can also seamlessly integrate into human lives unlike other wearable categories. This is mostly because wearing clothes is almost a second nature to humans.
Aside from those reasons, smart clothes just basically have so much more possibilities. With all the diverse ways that it’s being approached right now, it seems that we’re only scratching the surface of the possibilities for the technology. That’s something that no other category of wearables can boast of yet.
The story just came out today about this watch and Russia. There is a face on this watch that displays a rainbow that is associated with the gay pride / LGBTQ community. That face cannot be accessed in Russia, but it's not directly because of Russia not wanting it. Apparently, it is hardcoded by the developer not to show up on the phone if the locale of the phone is Russia. So instead of boycotting the product from Russia because of their views on homosexuality, they went this route.
Smartwatches and wearables in general haven’t caught on as predicted. Just in 2015, the demand for it was expected to rise by 500%. While it’s true that it did rise for a brief period, it never really got close the IDC mark. Today, it has even gotten slower. It really does feel like it’s a dying market. But is it really?
The answer is a complicated no.
As long as huge brands like Apple stay on their course and keep churning out models year after year, smartwatches will not die. In fact, International Data Corporation even expects this market to grow.
But why is the question of whether the market is dead even being asked if forecasts are so favorable?
It’s mostly because no one except Apple is making smartwatches that sell well. Year after year, the Apple watch keeps dominating this segment without competition. Fitbit, one if its closest competitors, reported a 2-million-unit deficit year-on-year in 2017. Smartwatch manufacturers LG and Samsung just couldn’t make a dent in the market and other makers of decent smartwatches of the past such as Motorola has given up on their attempt.
Apple has the smartwatch segment down because it did not get caught up in the app craze that other smartwatch makers focused on. Instead, it focused on the basics. The guys at Cupertino concentrated their efforts on the two main things people buy smartwatches for – notification and fitness tracking.
However, there are other smaller companies that’s gotten the market down pat just as much as Apple. They make excellent smartwatches that does notifications and fitness tracking extremely well too. The only problem is that they just don’t share the same high-profile label as the Cupertino based company.
So, if you’re in the market, whether it’s your first smartwatch purchase or you’ve had experience with them before, here are the top features that you need to watch out for.
Battery Life
One of the problems with smartwatches is that they add to the list of things to charge at the end of each day. If you continuously forget to charge your laptop, smartphone, and tablet at night, adding a smartwatch to that list would most likely end up in you having a discharged smartwatch on your wrist in the morning that’s not even capable of telling the time.
Even Apple Watches suffer from bad battery life. The Apple Watch 3, for example, lasts just 18 hours of continuous use. Some brands, however, has got an edge over the company. Some smartwatches such as the Amazfit Bip boast a 45-day battery life which easily outlasts Apple’s best attempt by more than one and a half months.
1. Sensors
A basic smartwatch should at least have some significant added value proposition versus traditional watches. For most people, just getting advanced notification doesn’t justify coughing up top dollars for a smartwatch that costs a lot more than just a regular watch. While it may sometimes be tedious, pulling your phone out of your bag and checking for notifications every so often is, after all, free of charge. This is mostly why Apple chooses to highlight fitness tracking aside from the notification features.
Fitness sensors the most common added features on a smartwatch. The heartrate sensor, for example, is something that not a lot of modern smartwatches have. Even high-profile brands such as Fossil with Wear OS do not have a heart rate sensor. It just makes one question the difference between a smartwatch and a regular old traditional Fossil watch that costs a lot less. Other than the heartrate sensor, GPS sensors are also nice features to have for fitness buffs.
It is also important to note that both of these sensors have been credited to have saved lives before. Since heartrate sensors are keep track of the wearers circulation, albeit a lot less accurate than traditional monitors, there are cases where smartwatches were able to catch irregularities in their owner’s cardiovascular condition. The GPS, on the other hand, can potentially help you navigate through unfamiliar areas even without cellular signal. It is, therefore, an important feature to have if you’re running through unfamiliar cities or through jungles where you can easily get lost.
2. OS Compatibility
Whether smartwatches have standalone capabilities or not your smartwatch experience will largely feel incomplete if you don’t pair it with your smartphone. Being compatible with your mobile devices, then, is perhaps the single most important feature to have for a smartwatch. Because they’re so small, smartwatches are not very intuitive to interact with. People with large fingers, for example, will not have a very nice time tapping through the watch’s interface. Having mobile OS that’s compatible with your smartwatch enables you to make the most out of the features that it has to offer.
Wear OS, for example, works best for Android phones even if it is advertised to be compatible with Apple products as well. On the other hand, Apple’s Watch OS is only compatible to iOS devices. So, if you’re an iPhone user, your money is perhaps best spent on an Apple Watch versus any other smartwatch.
Other manufacturers are choosing to go beyond the OS offerings from both Apple and Google to have better integration with both. The highly successful Amazfit smartwatches, for example, chose to go with their own OS that pair with both Android and iOS through a downloadable application in their respective app stores. Pebble watches also went this route with its own Pebble OS. They experienced some success with this strategy but they eventually succumbed to a hostile takeover from a Fitbit buyout.
What’s Next for Smartwatches?
The smartwatch is a relatively young market. Manufacturers are just finding their niches. Some, like Garmin, chooses to specialize in their watch’s GPS technology while, Google is trying to make their products standout with more standalone features. Apple, on the other hand, chooses to focus on refining their multipronged approach to smartwatches trying to perfect their fitness tracking and notification features.
While Apple enjoys its dominance, other manufacturers will continue to try to find their niche. Until then, it’s just going to be an exciting, albeit not very profitable, market where innovation is most likely to be cultivated in the need to stand out from the rest of the pack.
In this era, anything without the word 'smart' next to its name feels outdated. Everything has to be sophisticated to the point where its real purpose becomes unclear. Take these watches as one example. Other than an even quicker shortcut to some important apps, why do you think is there a demand for one?