While I am decidedly not a fan of any phone or tablet offered by Samsung since the entire market began, that really looks like a beautiful watch. At first I thought I was looking at a Tag-inspired device that must have some rudimentary smart functions, but then as the functions were shown I realized it was a full featured digital. The display seemed just right, with properly sized text and a nice layout.Of course seeing the actual watch made me realize that video was just an excellent rendering, and the real watch is not exactly delicate. Thats too bad. With Apple it was exactly the reverse - I thought the 42mm would be oversized, too chunky, and yet in person its actually quite slim. The Samsung looks as if it was dimensioned for lumberjack executives and pro wrestlers who fly in their spare time, and perhaps hipsters who will wear them on their pencil thin bodies as yet one more example of irony.
Since my early disdain for the Apple Watch I've grown to like it - even though I don't use 99 percent of what it can do. I think that Apple should produce a round bezel watch to augment their rectilinear offerings, if for no other reason than to appease customers who simply want a round watch. As to why I've come to appreciate it, if you guys don't mind the analogy, consider the pocket calculator...
I remember the first portable, battery operated calculators. They were chunky beasts, plastic with woodgrain accents, took a 9volt battery. Expensive too, and even though all they did was the basic four functions, they did them well and served us for a few years. Then people wanted more functions, so the basic four were supplemented with percents, parentheses and squares, and given operational memory. Meanwhile, they started getting smaller and lighter, with better battery performance. A few years later, HP came out with brilliant scientific calculators, followed shortly thereafter by Texas Instruments.
Then, one day while I was browsing through what passed for a consumer electronics store (I think it was Masters, the predecessor to Service Merchandise), I found a beautiful, small calculator. It seemed to be made of brushed aluminum. It was the size of a business card, maybe larger. The buttons had wonderful feel to them, and overall it just felt like a brilliant piece of design. It had only basic functions, and was also about 30 percent more expensive than the rest of the expanded feature, plastic calculators there. But I couldn't get it out of my head. If Jony Ive designed a calculator, that one was it.
And thats where we are right now, with the Apple Watch. Its a very fine piece of work that doesn't do everything under the sun. What it does, it does very well. The fit and finish is beyond comparison to everything else. It costs at least a third more than most of its competition, but most everyone that handles one ends up buying or at least wanting one.
Anyone who has been paying attention to calculators see where those things went: They became feature filled and very well designed indeed, before being subsumed into other categories, most notably phones. We have a few years ahead of us where we're going to see some pretty cool stuff out of these things. Probably pretty scary too.
I predict that the Watch ultimately will have some incredible features to it. We're so early in the watch game that a truly killer app is waiting a few months or even years down the road (I've written about this in earlier threads). There is one particular use for the Watch that I'm very surprised none of the other manufacturers have thought of it, and I am well convinced Apple envisioned the Watch for this sole use and everything else is just icing on that particular cake.
