Pavan Rajam, writing about a potential iWatch and its place in your device ecosystem:
The smartphone is easily the most personal device we own today. It is our life in our pockets. It is our connection to the rest of the world. We take them with us and use them where ever we can.
Yet there is still a gap, there is still some friction. There are moments when we are without our phones. We can lose them. They can be stolen. On the less sinister side, we give them to other people to look at something, or to hold for us.
There is simply no guarantee that the person using a smartphone is the person to whom it belongs. That’s problematic when you look at use cases which benefit from stronger ties between a user’s identity and presence in the physical world. Use cases like health tracking, home automation, payments, and transitioning between devices. These use cases benefit from something better, something more omnipresent to the user than a smartphone.
This is an excellent point. A wearable is personal. While someone else might use your phone, there are far fewer cases where someone would use your wearable, which makes it the perfect sensor for gathering truly personal data (e.g., pulse, stride, glucose/insulin levels).
While a watch is a wearable, it is not the perfect wearable for all use cases. By its very nature, a watch’s shape is constrained to be of a shape, size, and weight to fit unobtrusively on your wrist. Google Glass is a wearable that serve a very different function, so its place is on your face.
One advantage of a watch as a wearable is that it occupies some very special real estate on your body. If you want to communicate, your wrist can quickly be extended as needed. For example, if your watch was part of a payment system, you can extend your wrist to bring it into contact with a payment terminal, much more easily than digging out your phone or glasses.
Not to divert the conversation away from the iWear, but I’m also very interested in the future of the iPhone. I keep hearing about 4.7 inch and 5.5 inch phones, that those are the two sizes that Apple will introduce today. But whither the 4″ phone? Is that about to disappear?
John Gruber hypothesizes on his site that the 5S and 5C stick around for another year, and then next year the 5CS comes out, a 5C that inherits the technologies of the current 5S, and that becomes Apple’s annual low-end phone. Plastic body, 4″ size. I like that idea a lot, and I hope that’s the direction it goes.
A year ago I was conflicted about whether to get the 5S or the 5C: I much preferred the 5C’s form and materials but of course coveted the 5S’s tech. I reasoned that the tech would eventually come down to the 5C line, and in the meantime if I got to the one-year mark without bemoaning that I wish I had TouchID, then I’d be satisfied. That whatever new functions TouchID gained the following year (that is, today), that I could wait a year and be fine. Well, that’s exactly what’s happened (pending today’s announcement) and I’m very happy. I love my 5C, and I’m looking forward to a year from now when it has updated tech (assuming that’s what happens). I’ve not wanted a larger screen, and I want to have an open mind that Apple will figure out a way to make these larger screens not feel monstrous…but I like where the iPhone form factor is right now, with the 5C.
Aren’t many of the iWatch features dependent on a nearby iPhone?