“The iWatch will not by any means be just a watch,” Cary Hammer writes for Seeking Alpha. “It will assumedly have so many more functions — phone communications, health monitoring, maps and GPS directions, texting, voice-requested information, perhaps music and video and games and who knows what else — that timekeeping will be seen as a minor feature, as it is on the iPhone. The only similarity this product will have to a wristwatch is that they both reside on your wrist.”
“Yes, consumers that purchase an iWatch will not additionally buy a regular watch, but this is for Swatch to worry about. Apple doesn’t need to lie awake thinking that people won’t buy an iWatch because they already have a watch,” Hammer writes. “Did people not buy an iPad because one of the many things it lets you do is read eBooks, and they already have books?”
“It now seems likely that the iWatch will be an add-on to the iPhone. I would be greatly surprised if this weren’t true; this makes perfect sense from a practical standpoint. Rather than having to build telephone capability and internet connectivity and GPS into the iWatch itself, greatly increasing its cost as well as its size, these functions will be channeled through the iPhone, which already provides them,” Hammer writes. “But crucially, this means that you can’t use the iWatch without an iPhone. This will give iPhone a huge marketing advantage, pushing a lot of phone customers that are on the iPhone/Android fence firmly over to the iPhone side. Even for those customers that don’t want to spring for the iWatch at the time they purchase their phone, I expect many will not want to lock themselves later out of the iWatch option by going with Android.”
Read more in the full article here.
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