Two big concerns for me: 1) Battery life 2) Display visibility
They go hand-in-hand for me. Get that nice high-res display but will it last me a day? For battery life it would be nice to have induction charging if it were to last about 8 hours (my personal guess).
Battery life, screen brightness/visibility (can I read the screen on a clear summer day at noon?), size, and ease of use are all really important. Price matters for business purposes, but I wonder what could be done if that were not considered as a factor.
But since they'll have to compromise on those parameters (or just physically can't push them too far) it makes you wonder if this thing will actually be worth it. It's definitely cool, but is it really that much better than just having a smart phone? Is it $600-$1,000 better? I have a hard time imagining it would be... hopefully I'm wrong!
The use of color is limited imho, you won't look at high res pictures (or really anything that isn't very limited in size and scope).
Monochrome or 'a couple' colors would be more than enough for me.
eInk has serious benefits, especially when it comes to battery life. I love my Kindle. I can see how something like the Pebble would be a nice watch and eInk's battery drain is probably a big part of what makes it work so well.
But if you want it to feel interactive with a nice touch screen for swipes, eInk isn't going to do it. Take that video but change all the animations to 5 fps... would it be an amazing watch or just feel like a product that was reaching too far?
Similarly, color is a nice add but it could go wrong. The only pictures of color eInk I've seen look much worse than cheap newsprint. At that point the color isn't adding much, it's just detracting.
Samsung supposedly has much better battery life on the Gear 2. Keeping the display off most of the time would definitely help too. I want to see a review of this. If it's half as cool as it looks in their promo I'll be quite impressed.
I feel like not having color is a price I'm willing to pay to not have to charge my watch every day
If they skimp and try to put in cheap hardware and go for a $500 price target then this is going to fall flat. Hopefully they understand the watch market and know to charge more and put in the best materiel, but knowing the tech industry I doubt it a lot.
[1] http://www.thewatchquote.com/List-Price-and-tariff-for-Montb...
...which will render the product DOA.
If all you want to do is tell the time quickly, a $10 quartz watch does the job just fine.
I am sure Vertu or some other ridiculous company will sell you your insane diamond-encrusted titanium penis size signifier with a touch screen and Android Wear integration, but it won't be any more functional than the regular version.
Also, Swatch have some very nice ones, with a VERY good price.
Simple, round, small.
With this round steel case, you could even exchange the wristband for a brown lethear one and get a more mature look (all this for only 30 bucks).
For comparison: My first two watches lasted 2 years each and costed me ~$10 a pop plus they had a WR rating of 300m. Sadly they looked kinda juvenile and I needed something with a little more status, but I'm leaning on just going back because they really worked!
I personally never bath with a watch on and never go swimming with this particular watch (I have another one that I use mainly for outdoor activities. A Casio rated to 100 meters).
I really dig watches, and when you start to collect some of them you actually find it's quite fun to chose the right one for the right ocasion! :)
For those of a certain extreme old age, say, over 30, one problem is not wearing a watch has been a display of wealth for some decades now. The signal is, "I don't wear a watch anymore, I pay an expensive cellphone contract instead". Last time I wore a watch was during the Clinton presidency.
For elders like me, wearing a watch would indicate I'm too poor to have a phone.
Put another way the first cell phone contract I was aware of, was four times our current cable TV bill. Or about ten times the landline bill. So that would be quite expensive indeed.
Most over 30 who want to show off their wealth actually do wear a watch, an expensive one at that. I don't know where you get this bs notion that NOT wearing a watch is a sign of wealth. You don't have to be rich to afford a $50-80/mo. contract but you do for that $100,000 Vacheron.
— Blake, Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
You'd have better success taking that $4000 watch and adding android bits to it. Advertise it as the same expensive fancy watch with more smarts in it. That ball is in the fancy-watch company's court, not google's.
All that said I agree with you about the battery. It'll have to be nice enough to make it worth it. Lots of people need one less reason to get sucked into checking notifications on their phone.
Also Adding new calendar events and setting the alarm, are both so much easier via voice. Sports too "ok Google Now, did the Bulls Win?"
Once you get in the habit of using it, its very convenient.
Glad to see this is being integrated within the watch.
The features presented (est. time to work based on my route, etc) is not data I want to be present in googles dataset.
On the other hand these wearables are pretty great in this sense, for the first time you are the customer (usually the businesses buying ads are).
I can't decide whether this is genius or ludicrous, but on your phone, you can ask Google Now "What time is it" and get a spoken-word response. So presumably, you could wear a watch that you have to just ask for the time when you're outside. :)