Narrative: Wearables are Struggling
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Strategy Analytics Says Apple Top Wearables Vendor in Q1 (May 8, 2017)
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Fitbit Reports Worst Revenue in Nearly 3 Years, Second Straight Quarter of Heavy Losses (May 3, 2017)
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Apple Watch Loses Google Maps, Amazon, eBay Apps (May 1, 2017)
This piece does a good job digging up the news that several iPhone apps from high-profile names have quietly ditched their Apple Watch companion apps. I’m seeing some spin this as a sign that the Apple Watch isn’t working for people, but the reality is that we’re seeing two rather different things at play here. Firstly, apps on the Apple Watch were one of the big misjudgments on Apple’s part: as a group, they really haven’t taken off, not least because in their first couple of iterations they were painfully slow to use. Performance of apps has improved markedly in watchOS 3 and on the Series 2 hardware, but that leaves us with problem number two: many of the apps launched for the Watch simply don’t provide enough utility either on a standalone basis or as alternatives to the iOS versions to be worthwhile. And what we’re seeing now is some of those failed experiments going by the wayside.
We’re still figuring out what works and what doesn’t on the Watch, although a glance at the official App Store for the Watch gives you some idea of what Apple thinks: health and fitness apps dominate the first screen, followed by games, news, sports, and finally utilities. Apple obviously has its own play for navigation, which works particularly well for walking directions, and the Amazon and eBay apps were always a bit of a stretch. The eBay app is a great example of a use case that doesn’t actually need its own app but can work perfectly fine with interactive notifications or a widget on the iPhone. So we’re likely to continue to see apps come and go from the Watch, not least because developers now have many possible areas of investment around iOS apps, including watchOS, tvOS, iPad support, support for the unique hardware features on the iPad Pro line, and so on. As such, some are likely very wise to prioritize other features and platforms over the Apple Watch, while others will do well putting their investment on people’s wrists.
via Apple Insider
Fitbit’s Next Smartwatch Leaked in Images and Other Details (May 1, 2017)
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Alphabet’s Life Sciences Unit Verily Reveals Watch-Like Tracker for Health Studies (Apr 14, 2017)
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Fitbit’s new smartwatch has been plagued by production mishaps – Yahoo Finance (Apr 11, 2017)
This isn’t good news for Fitbit, at a time when it was supposed to be recovering from a tough year and getting back to profitability and eventually growth. As I’ve said before, I suspect its push into the smartwatch market will be more of a distraction than a help to the company’s overall performance – it puts it head to head against Apple in a category Apple currently dominates and takes it out of the sweet spot it’s historically done well in. If it’s also unable to produce a decent product in accordance with its own internal timeframes, then that bodes even worse for the further push into this category following the Blaze launch last year. Another big question not addressed by this article is to what extent Fitbit will be able to integrate some of what it acquired from Pebble and Vector over recent months in this new product – so far, it looks like it’s more of an iteration on the Blaze than something completely new.
via Yahoo Finance
Tag Heuer Connected Modular 45 hands-on review – Wired (Mar 17, 2017)
Earlier in the week, I wrote about Swatch’s smartwatch operating system and components, and in passing referred to Tag Heuer’s Android strategy. It’s now in the second phase of that strategy, with a highly modular and customizable approach this time around, and a modest goal of selling 150,000 of these watches, compared to just over 50,000 of its first attempt. That’s obviously a tiny fraction of the overall smartwatch market, and it’s hard to see how it’ll make money at this scale with this much customization. Apple has offered the most customization of any tech-centric smartwatch to date by far, but this Tag watch seems to take the concept much further, which may be appealing to potential customers, though the watch itself looks incredibly thick and bulky, even for a Tag.
via WIRED
Swatch Takes on Google, Apple With Watch Operating System – Bloomberg (Mar 16, 2017)
It’s fascinating to think about this move in the context of the history of Swatch. Though the company incorporates much older brands, the Swatch name and brand arose in the early 1980s out of the Swiss watch industry’s previous crisis: quartz watches from Asia. Those watches caused a massive decline in the Swiss watch industry as cheap, highly accurate watches from Asia flooded the market. The Swatch brand was created to compete with these quartz watches, offering a simpler mechanical watch with cheaper materials that could compete with the new entrants, and it worked. Now, it appears Swatch wants to defend against the new crisis – smartwatches eating market share – with its own entrant, based on technology co-developed with a Swiss university that specializes in miniaturization. I may be biased, but suspect it’s easier for the tech industry to learn about watches than it is for watchmakers to get really good at technology, even with some help. I’m skeptical that this move will work out, but given how poorly Android Wear has fared, it certainly can’t hurt, and may well do better than competitor Tag Heuer’s Android strategy.
via Bloomberg
The Apple Watch is still the best designed smartwatch – The Verge (Mar 14, 2017)
This is a good follow-up to this morning’s item about the new Android Wear watch from Huawei, and argues much as I did that other smartwatch makers are largely failing to learn the lessons of or compete effectively with the Apple Watch. It frames the discussion in terms of the compromises and tradeoffs watchmakers choose to make, which seems a smart way to think about it, and has arguably always been one of Apple’s strengths.
via The Verge
Huawei Watch 2 review: No time for this half-baked sequel – Android Central (Mar 14, 2017)
I linked to reviews of Android Wear 2.0 and the LG watches that launched at the same time a few weeks ago, and those were pretty negative. Now, here we have another entry from a major Android vendor and it seems to be at least as bad as LG’s. At this point, it feels like some Android vendors have given up on the platform entirely, while others seem to have given up trying to make a smartwatch competitive with the Apple Watch but are still putting what they do have out into the market. None of this is going to help Android Wear or smartwatches in general. I’ve said before that I think it will take a Pixel-style first party entry from Google to give this platform the boost it needs, because for now Android Wear continues to be more or less irrelevant in the smartwatch and broader wearable market. Even if Google does get into this market directly, however, it continues to be far smaller and narrower than many people originally thought, and it’s currently dominated by Apple.
via Android Central