FaceTime isn't going to get me to upgrade my Apple Watch. Apple needs to address the following:
- Slow app load times. They're still not that good under Watch OS 2. They'll probably need a bigger battery to run more tasks on the watch itself, perhaps along with more RAM or a faster Bluetooth connection to the iPhone.
- Increase speaker volume. It's difficult to hear people on the phone. For me, it's just barely too low. A 15-20% increase would be fine.
- Additional health sensors. Gen 1 was a nice first step, but people really need blood pressure monitoring, glucose tracking, etc so that they can keep on top of their health. Unfortunately I think that would require FDA approval, and if I remember right, Cook recently had comments against that.
- Week long battery life. Or at least work-week long. I'm not as annoyed with the battery as I thought it would be, but a massive increase in battery life would be enough for me to upgrade—or at least definitely push me to do so. I don't think this will happen any time soon. Just like iPhones over the years, battery life improvements have been tiny (aside from the Plus model). Apple puts more resources into speed increases and thinness. I hope they don't become obsessed with making the watch thin. My Apple Watch is a little thinner than my old mechanical watch. It doesn't need to be thinner.
As for making the watch more independent of the iPhone—I've got an idea: the Apple Sim. Could the Apple Watch be put into a mode that would allow the iPhone to handoff the sim card digitally to the Watch, powering up a cellular modem when going out to exercise, etc? I wonder how power efficient you could make a 3g or slow 4g chip using the latest chip fab process? Even just a few Mbits should be enough to easily load the type of content consumed on the Watch. But apps need to be made more independent before that can happen.
TL;DR: I hope the next Apple Watch is more energy efficient with a volume boost in the same case design. Increased power capacity could help drive components to run apps completely natively on the device, and perhaps a low-power 3g or 4g chipset that gets Apple SIM info handed off digitally from the iPhone when going out to exercise or whatever. Additional health sensors are icing on the cake.