I confess: I own a Pebble Watch. I've also completely bought into the quantitative-self movement and, thus, own a gadget that measures my sleep, three devices that measure my activity, a heart-rate monitor chest strap, and multiple apps on my phone that allow me to see what I am doing and how well I am doing it.
I buy into the wearable revolution, and I've fully come to terms with the Internet of everything slowly taking over my house and life. I fully expect to have an automated house in the future and a car I can monitor from my devices. Yet, with all this, I still believe most device companies have it all wrong.
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It's not that I don't like the idea of a smart watch, but I gave up wearing a watch a decade ago, and only rarely do I put one on. I like my Pebble, which is a great first effort, but it doesn't really solve anything for me. I had a Timex Datalink in the mid-1990s: You held it up to your computer monitor that flashed a pattern of lights to transfer data, assuming you didn't go into an epileptic seizure while it transferred. It was a useful watch because back then PDAs weren't really mainstream, so you could carry your address book around without hooking it into a device.
The issue now: Why would I wear a watch that requires me to take my device out of my pocket to read the message the watch alerts me to? Sure, it's fine when you want to ignore a call and leave the smartphone in your pocket, but if it's a long email or one you need to reply to, out comes the smartphone. Samsung made a point in its Galaxy Gear smartwatch presentation that when you take your Note 3 "phablet" out after seeing a notification on the Gear watch, the phablet displays whatever message the notification was about.
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