Wearable tech will be hot. The smartphone market is maturing and starting to plateau, so manufacturers are pushing into new territories to expand on our relationships with data and services. Google’s Android Wear platform is an excellent step in the right direction to legitimize this new market segment.
It does suffer from one fatal flaw however: Battery life.
Playing with several different solutions for wrist computing, my favorite so far are the watches that can best replicate the experience found on traditional time pieces. Namely a screen that can always be referenced for small pieces of information no matter what orientation it’s worn, not depending on any gestures to activate it. I mentioned as much in my last FFC VLOG.
Of course in technology land, compromises have to be made. If you want crazy new features, you have to accept some new limitations.
For the Galaxy Gear and the Gear 2, Samsung balanced battery life by turning the screen off as often as possible. Either a wrist gesture or a button press would turn the screen on. Not very convenient when your hands are stationary and you want to reference the device, but it provides for two to three days of battery life.
For Android Wear, Google is dictating an always-on screen experience. This solves the problem of having to dedicate some kind of action to activating the screen, but the counterbalance is run time. Samsung’s Gear Live (which has the same size battery as the Gear 2) is only rated for about a day of use. I would imagine that heavy use outdoors (where screen brightness is required) will probably wipe it out even faster.
New screen technology is required…
And this is the major problem of using traditional smartphone screen tech for a wearable. Your phone doesn’t look great outdoors in direct sunlight. AMOLED and LCD screens need to crank into overdrive to overcome even overcast days. Your phone probably packs a pretty large battery, so between indoor and outdoor usage you can probably find some balance, but watches have far less space to pack the juice away.
We also have a problem of screen usage overlap. If my watch and phone both have AMOLED screens that means they both have the same pros and cons. They both look great indoors and in low light situations. They both wash out and are harder to read during daylight situations. Ideally a wearable should also help fill some of the gaps a phone leaves.
It’s a watch. If I take an analog chronometer outside it doesn’t get harder to read.
Companies like Pebble, Martian, and Qualcomm have released devices which address this issue. The Pebble uses a digital ink display similar to an e-reader, the Martian Passport has a traditional analog watch face for time, and the Toq’s Mirasol display uses millions of tiny mirrors to reflect light back through a color display. Two low tech solution, one high tech, but all provide for more than four days of actual use on a single charge, with screens that never turn off, and look fantastic in direct sunlight.
Android Wear is a game changer from a software perspective. It’ll be an incredible solution, providing an OS to companies looking to enter the wearable market who might not have the resources to develop their own UI in house.
Unfortunately, if the current thinking prevails, slapping back-lit traditional phone screens on watches, it’ll likely mar the experience of this first wave of Wear gadgets.