I'm wondering how they'll do a solid state digital crown.
If they keep the Digital Crown, then they’re doing it strictly for style. An anachronistic throwback to the analogue watch, which is one of the chief arguments some make against having a round watch.
The Taptic Engine makes a lot of sense for a watch, as it’s the mechanical parts that breakdown. Buttons and crowns and the like. And there’s absolutely no reason to keep the crown now. There’s a nice thick bezel on the watch which can be used as a crown, and even if the touch capacitance is defeated by water or sweat, the Taptic Engine can sort out what the user is trying to do. Tapping the bezel along the length will advance the scroll, in much the same way as clicking along a scroll bar on a Mac advances the window scroll incrementally.
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The engineering difficulties behind making something like that work and still retain all-day battery life are far from trivial, for a number of reasons. Idle power draw would probably go up by several hundred percent. I wouldn't expect it, honestly. Also, OLED displays work poorly with static graphics elements; you'd get noticeable burn-in on the display within a week tops, and I can only imagine how much people would scream their heads off on forums over that...
Well, other smart watches offer always on displays. But you do make a good point about OLED INhadnt considered before. Even a dim static display would lead to burn in on an OLED in no time, even if the image were constantly shifting, which just takes more power. But Apple is looking at micro LED displays going forward, right? Might that solve some of these issues?
Oh gods please no. How would you fit it? There's not enough room on either the bezel or in the case to put one there, and image quality would be absolutely abysmal. You could only squeeze in the worst kind of miniature pinhole webcam sensors, and aiming it in any sort of steady fashion would be a nightmare, especially for anyone on the other end watching you through it.
I don’t really agree. The Apple Watch currently has a huge bezel, which would easily accommodate the lens of my iPhone FaceTime camera. The rumor is that they’re enlarging the display, possibly edge to edge, in which case that’s lost, but they could always add a notch on the watch, just like they did on the iPhone (makes the flat tire complaint on the Moto sort of trivial)

. If everything else is going toward face recognition, why not the watch?
The larger issue, is whether there’s enough room in the case to accommodate the camera mechanism, and not compromise battery life. Certainly getting rid of the physical buttons and stupid Digital Crown would free up quite a bit of room.
As for aiming it, it would primarily be for FaceTime and face recognition purposes, and aiming shouldn’t be a problem with visual display feedback. It could also be used for snapping quick pics when otherwise without a phone, and aim would be general. I shoot photos like that with my iPhone all the time which turn out fine. Sometimes, I just get feet, but most of the time it works. On the watch it will definitely be better than nothing. For things like selfies in a mirror it would work just fine. The camera could also be used for scanning bar codes and such, and could have an audible or haptic feedback for when captured.
So it’s not pointless, so long as there are no other major compromises to accommodate it.