Wearing a watch doesn’t make sense to me given I carry a phone and it has a watch and a bunch of other stuff, so a watch is unneeded redundancy as far as I’m concerned, but I’d consider wearing a sensor bracelet if the sensors are worthy (which makes me wonder why doesn’t my phone have a temperature sensor in it).
2 use cases for me for a smart watch that pairs with my phone (aside from the sensors):
When riding my bike to work, I would love to have a remote display/control of my phone - to view SMS without stopping to pull the phone out of my bag; to be able to change the song Pandora is playing, etc.
If you are in meetings, not having to look at your phone for emails, SMS, calls etc would be nice.
In those 2 use cases, I wouldn’t be looking to do as much as on the device itself.
The primary useage would be to quickly see who messaging/calling me with enough information to determine if I need to respond. But other features listed below would be nice.
Control – my preference would be physical buttons of some sort, but touch screen could work as well.
Buttons:
Mode – cycle between modes
Several action buttons
Modes –
Time
Stopwatch; Actions:
[ul]* start/stop
lap
clear
reset
save for upload (perhaps with some GPS coordination, one the phone device)[/ul]
SMS; Actions:
[ul]List recent senders/time stamps
Select to view from list
Respond with pre-programmed response (like “On my bike now, I’ll respond soon”)
Would be nice to have several response options, so buttons to select which one[/ul]
Audio; Actions:
[ul]Stop/Pause/Play
Next track
Volume up/down (usually get headphones with a volume already)
Not sure Pandora supports it, but buttons to “like”/“dislike” a song[/ul]
The items with * would be, for me, the minimum desired.
Display – Ratio is not important to me, as long as there’s enough rows of data to see:
Message Type (call, email, sms, etc)
Sender name
Message summary (maybe first x characters of the message)
It would be nice for the device to interface with Cortana so that I could speak a text reply without pulling out the phone.
Another nicety would be A2DP perhaps to use the wearable as a speakerphone extension. But would be tricky when riding the bike to provide adequate volume and to cancel out the wind noise.
For me, that’s not as important. I think the processor and communication intensive work would happen on the phone. The wearable tech should expose its sensor data for the phone.
If there’s expandability imo it should be via a MEF style extensibility, rather than getting at the source code. So a dev could write modules that plug into the wearable (like an app on a phone). But everyone has different wants/needs.
I still use watches because I can get the time in a fraction of a second, as oppose to having to find my phone (which is not always on my person). It is because my phone is not always on my person and my watch is that I would def buy a “arm” watch if it worked flawlessly with phone7