Comment Data generator, not data viewer (Score 1) 427
Frankly, I'd like it to be more like the crop of data acquiring bands that we see right now with a small time display, and that's it. I'd like it to capture a lot of health data (HR, distance travelled, etc.) and it should sync with my ANT+ bike equipment (cadence monitor, speed, power, everything) and act as a proxy to my phone and feed my phone data.
Look, the phone is the thing with the screen that you actually want to look at. A watch face is too small for anything except small bites of information except the time and the date. The new Withings Activite watch actually looks pretty good; no digital display at all. The battery lasts a year. It tells you if you're meeting your daily goals and basically nothing else. But it captures data. THAT'S useful.
I'm never going to read email on my watch that's coming from my phone; how could that possibly make any sense? MAYBE I wouldn't mind a sort of morse code vibration to it that tells me if I got a notification by text, mail or other.
Part of the problem with the current crop of smart watches is they haven't thought about what kind of information is appropriate to display on a screen that small. A watch is meant to be GLANCED at, not stared at. Information has to come in digestible, atomic chunks. We can process the relative position of two arms on the face very quickly, but an email or text requires a few seconds of reading, particularly if the font is small or the words have been forced to be wrapped.
We need to rethink data display before we can make use of these devices. Right now, it's the wrong data for the form factor.