“The demand drivers for smartwatches are not strong at all and it will take a really transformative product to stimulate demand beyond the current niche levels,” Jan Dawson writes for Tech.pinions.
“Among the major functions smartwatches look to perform today, two stand out: fitness tracking and push notifications on the wrist. The major challenge for smartwatch vendors is neither of these is exactly a mass market proposition. My surveys indicate 80% of the US and UK populations has never used a fitness tracker at all, and, of those who have, roughly half have abandoned them,” Dawson writes. “Turning to push notifications, about three quarters of the smartphone population uses them, which sounds good. But digging deeper shows (a) only about half the US population uses a smartphone and (b) of those who use push notifications, many use them for a single app only (often text messaging) and many more use them for only two apps. I believe the sweet spot for a smartwatch majoring on push notifications is people who use them for three or more apps, and that’s only about a quarter of smartphone users.”
“Smartwatches today, like smartphones then, had a niche appeal. Smartphone penetration in the US was in single digits in 2007, and that reflected the fact most people hadn’t seen the need to buy one,” Dawson writes. “All that changed dramatically in 2007 when Apple introduced the iPhone and gave people a fundamentally different set of reasons to buy a smartphone. It now became a sort of pocket computer, good for all sorts of tasks beyond email and work. And of course over the next few years, we saw other phone makers adopt a similar approach… Does Apple have the potential to somehow overcome these technical challenges, as it seemed to do with the iPhone in 2007?”
Read more in the full article here.
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