Smartwatches are revolutionary devices in the market and we are seeing progressively increasing interest towards them. It is expected that millions of smartwatches will be sold in the market in the near future and there are some reasons to believe that they will become real competitors to smartphones. Some smartwatches come with embedded communication features, so they don’t really require pairing with a nearby smartphone. In essence, smartwatch could replicate some if not much of the computing experience we get from smartphone. The miniscule wrist-sized display could be rather limited, but this doesn’t always translate to much more impaired usability and capability. In fact, smartwatches could extend the functionality of our other devices, such as smartphones onto the smaller display. There are things we should consider before we purchase a smartwatch. Here are things we need to consider:
- Designs: The design of a smartwatch is directly related to the wrist strap, face and body. The first we need to examine is obviously the watch body and it could be too bulky for us. It should be fashionable and look cool on us. Many models have clean sporty looks, so they could blend well with most sports attire.
- Functionality and reliability: Smartwatches shouldn’t only look good they should also be able to carry out their assigned tasks. Consumers should weigh in common advantages and disadvantages of choosing specific smartwatch models. It is not a good idea to choose a watch that causes to jab frustratingly on its tiny display. Excessively small display could also make information consumption much harder to achieve. Having said that, there should be an easy way to scroll and select objects on the screen.
- Apps: There are many 3rd party developers out there who are eager to provide us with wonderful, new apps that could just extend the usability of smartwatches a little bit further. Before purchasing a smartwatch model, we should make sure that it has good apps support and typically, Android-based models could give us enough compatibility. However, there could be some smartwatches with obscure software platform that could be rather limited in versatility. By choosing more popular operating system, new apps will be rolled out in much faster rate. Although software platforms could get more mature eventually, it is a bad idea to choose models with lack of support and versatility. A good app may shave off a few hours of our schedule, for example, we won’t be trapped in traffic if the smartwatch could warn us about what happen on the road ahead.
- Battery life: Smartwatches have limited battery units and this would result in shorter runtime. Smartwatches could be useful only if has enough power. It will be useless of the battery indicator already reaches the critical 15 percent even before lunch. Smartwatches are actually miniaturised computing devices and some of them may have processors that are not really optimized for low-power operations. Consumers should consider about possible trade-offs and avoid using models that give too many drawbacks.