“Google has announced ‘Android Wear,’ a new extension of Android to power smart watches (it also realised some teaser renders of Motorola smart watches that are due for this summer). The Wear concept is that smart watches are remote touch displays for an Android smartphone,” Benedict Evans blogs. “In effect, the watch is a device for using Google Now and cards that apps on the phone send to it.”
“Now contrast this with the rumours of a new Apple ‘Healthbook’ app. I hate speculating upon Apple rumours, because they could come true next week, next year or never, but they provoke an interesting idea,” Evan writes. “Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Apple does indeed plan a health app that’s card-based, somewhat like Passbook. What would happen when you buy and turn on a blood pressure monitor that is certified for ‘Healthbook’? Well, one would expect that Apple would use the Bluetooth LE auto discovery that’s already in iOS7 to detect it automatically and tell you. And then, suppose it offers to install the Healthbook card to manage it (either from iTunes or from the device itself) – an HTML/Javascript package that runs in the Healthbook sandbox in some way. Suppose it does the same for any sensor you might buy? Then Apple has created a zero-setup platform for personal health devices. No apps, no native code, no app store, no configuration at all.”
Evan writes, “It seems to me that the key question this year is that now that the platform war is over, and Apple and Google won, what happens on top of those platforms? How do Apple and Google but also a bunch of other companies drive interaction models forward? I’ve said quite often that on mobile the internet is in a pre-Pagerank phase, lacking the ‘one good’ discovery mechanism that the desktop web had, but it’s also in a pre-Netscape phase, lacking one interaction model in the way that the web dominated the desktop internet for the last 20 years. Of course that doesn’t mean there’ll be one, but right now everything is wide open. This thought, incidentally, is one of the things that prompted this tweet.”
https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/statuses/446071876956082176
Read more in the full article – highly recommended – here.